You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Pan Macmillan has won a nine-publisher UK auction for the hotly contested début novel The Language of Flowers by US author Vanessa Diffenbaugh.
Senior commissioning editor for fiction Jenny Geras, with fiction publisher Jeremy Trevathan, bought UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding ANZ) for a six-figure sum from Zoe Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge & White working on behalf of Sally Wofford-Girand of Brick House Literary Agents.
The novel, which has already sold to Ballantine in the US for more than $1m (£677,000), and has seen "auctions breaking out in every major territory", is being compared to books such as The Time Traveler’s Wife and Chocolat. It tells the story of a young woman, Victoria, who has grown up in a San Francisco children’s home and been traumatised by a series of failed adoptions. She gets the chance to become a florist, and learns to help her customers through the long forgotten "language of flowers", a Victorian-era form of communication in which each flower and floral arrangement conveys a specific meaning. A love story develops, while in a series of flashbacks the story of Victoria’s painful childhood unfolds.
Geras said everyone at Pan Macmillan who read the book "instantly saw a bestseller".
She added: "The book has a brilliant commercial hook, but the way in which Vanessa combines that flowers theme with the darkness with which she writes about Victoria’s troubled childhood is what made the book stand out for me."
Diffenbaugh, who has degrees in creative writing and art education, is an activist who has worked with "at risk" young people, including homeless and foster children. She and her husband have two young children and are also foster parents.
The Language of Flowers will be published in hardback in the autumn of 2011, with Pan Macmillan m.d. Anthony Forbes Watson describing it as "one of our lead hardbacks for 2011 and a bestselling lead paperback in spring 2012."