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The Penguin Children’s Rights team has sold the rights to The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones: The Voyage of the Feroshus Maggot by Will Mabbitt, one of its most prominent titles at this year’s Bologna Book Fair, in nine countries.
Penguin has sold rights in the US, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Spain (in both Castilian and Catalan), Turkey and Taiwan.
The book is about a girl called Mabel who is taken by a creature called a “silent loris” and bundled onto the pirate ship the Feroshus Maggot. There she meets a bunch of pirates captained Idryss Ebenezer Split – a wolf with a false leg carved from a human thighbone – and embarks on the adventure of a lifetime.
The book was one of the “hot” titles at the Bologna Book Fair in March and Zosia Knopp, group rights director at Penguin Children’s, hopes the book will be as successful as Sally Green’s Half Bad, the title that launched at Bologna 2013.
Penguin revealed the Half Bad cover last September, ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair, saying the title had by then sold in 25 languages. It has now sold in more than 35 territories.
“We hope and expect that Mabel will be as big for us in the middle-grade field as Half Bad was for us in young adult,” said Knopp.
The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones: The Voyage of the Feroshus Maggot, will launch on 4th June 2015. This year’s Frankfurt fair will take place 8th-12th October.