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Former Bloomsbury commissioning editor Bill Swainson has signed new novels by leading international authors Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vásquez for Quercus imprint Maclehose Press.
On behalf of MacLehose Press, freelance editor and literary consultant Bill Swainson acquired UK & Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) to The Imposter by Cercas, from Gloria Gutiérrez at the Balcells Agency, Barcelona.
The Imposter is a "true story, which nevertheless is packed with fiction". The fiction is that of the real Enric Marco, who claimed to be a concentration camp survivor and rose to be president of Spain’s leading Holocaust survivor movement, the Friends of Mauthausen. By the time he was unmasked on the eve of a major commemoration in Austria in 2005, he had become a true civic hero. The Imposter is an "extraordinary" novel that both tells Marco’s self-deluding story, and "challenges the reader to consider how truthful any of us are in the way we present ourselves in our daily lives".
Swainson also acquired UK & Commonwealth rights to Vásquez's The Shape of the Ruins from Maria Lynch at Casanovas & Lynch, Barcelona.
The Shape of the Ruins takes the form of personal and formal investigations into two political assassinations – the murders of Rafael Uribe Uribe in 1914, the man who inspired Gabriel García Márquez’s General Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude (Penguin), and of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the man who might have been Colombia’s J.F.K., gunned down on the brink of success in the presidential elections of 1948.
Separated by more than 30 years, the two murders at first appear unconnected, but as the novel progresses, Vásquez reveals how between them they contain "the seeds of the violence that has bedevilled Colombia ever since". The Shape of the Ruins is Vásquez’s most ambitious, challenging and rewarding novel to date, the publisher said.
In addition to publishing these books with MacLehose Press, Swainson will continue to work as a freelance editor and literary consultant.