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Chatto and David Fickling buy crossover 'epic'

19.04.12 | Charlotte Williams

Chatto & Windus and David Fickling Books have together acquired a new novel by Guardian First Book Award finalist Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star, likened by the publisher to literary crossover novel The Passage.

Editorial director Clara Farmer and editor Juliet Brooke bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, in the novel alongside David Fickling Books editorial director Bella Pearson, which will publish a children's edition of the book. The deal was signed with Victoria Hobbs at A M Heath and Christy Fletcher at Fletcher & Co. It will be published in 2014, with Ecco to publish in the US and Knopf in Canada.

The publisher described it as a "breathtakingly ambitious novel [that] is both a post-apocalyptic epic adventure, and biting allegory about modern America, told in a brilliantly inventive patois". The book is narrated by 15-year-old Ice Cream Star, the story follows her and her band of fellow teenagers who are on a quest to find the cure for plague-like disease, Posies. 

• Charlotte Williams
• Chatto & Windus
• Clara Farmer
• David Fickling Books
• Rights deal
• Sandra Newman