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Atlantic Books has signed a new novel from the author of The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas.
Ravi Mirchandani signed the title, Barracuda, from Jenny Hewson at Rogers, Coleridge & White, buying UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Atlantic will publish Barracuda in spring 2014, while Allen & Unwin will publish the novel in Australian and New Zealand this autumn.
The Slap was originally published by Allen & Unwin in Australia in 2008, and was then bought for the UK by Colm Tóibín’s imprint Tuskar Rock, with the Atlantic paperback following in 2011. In Britain, it has sold 500,000 copies, according to the publisher, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Barracuda follows a young competitive swimmer who devotes his life to the sport in the hopes of escaping his humble immigrant background. But when his talent is proven to be less that he thought, his life enters a downward spiral, with the novel jumping between Danny’s youth and age as he seeks to find his true identity away from the pool.
Mirchandani said: “'If Christos' The Slap was a brilliant, blistering, bilious satire of modern Australian family life—and by extension family life in the Western world—his new novel is something else entirely, the compulsively readable story of a brilliant young swimmer, who dedicates his young life entirely to his sport, only to find that his talent is not as great as he had believed . . .
"Barracuda is a powerfully moving story of forgiveness and growing up, a novel of the struggle towards maturity of an angry young man, written by a novelist at the peak of his powers.”