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Granta has won a “hotly contested pre-holiday auction” to win Jenny Offill’s new novel The Dept. of Speculation.
Editorial director Laura Barber acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Greene & Heaton on behalf of Union Literary. Rights also went to Knopf in the US, Editions Calmann-Lévy in France and Novo Conceito in Brazil, with other auctions underway.
Scheduled for spring 2014, the novel is a “mature, wise and surprising story about marriage and motherhood, love and madness”.
Barber also acquired A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli, with the French author making his debut in English. The novel is described as a “spare, stunning story about three SS officers and their Jewish prisoner, who share a meal and facing a chilling choice”. Barber acquired world English Language rights for Portobello Books from Editions Stock for publication autumn 2013.
Finally, Barber acquired for Portobello Multiples: 12 Stories in 18 Languages by 61 Authors. Author Adam Thirwell “masterminded” the project, which features writers including Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Laurent Binet and Sheila Heti.
Barber acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from the Wylie Agency on behalf of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern for publication this summer, with a launch event at Edinburgh International Book Festival. The publisher saidthe title is a “literary relay race in which stories pass from hand to hand, from language to language, changing all the while, with surprising, thought-provoking, and frequently funny results".