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Viking acquires Stasiland author in pre-Fair deal

05.10.10 | Charlotte Williams

Viking has acquired a novel by Stasiland author Anna Funder amid a trio of pre-Fair deals.

Publishing director Venetia Butterfield bought UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Australia and New Zealand, and with exclusive Europe) to All That I Am by Funder through Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency.

The novel, to be published in summer 2011, tells the story of four people risking their lives to alert the world to Hitler.

Butterfield said: "Anna Funder has written a breathtaking novel that I know will be read for many years to come . . . All That I Am is a mesmerising book that leaves us wiser to the human condition."

Butterfield and commissioning editor Will Hammond also bought rights to Creation by Adam Rutherford from Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit UK following a six-way auction.

Creation, subtitled "The Story of Life on Earth and How We are About to Start it Again", explains how humanity is on the cusp of creating synthetic life. Rutherford is a writer, broadcaster and scientist, with a three-part series "Genome" airing on BBC4 in spring 2011.

Rebecca Folland at Janklow & Nesbit UK will sell translation rights at Frankfurt, and P J Mark at Janklow & Nesbit Associates will handle North American rights.

Viking will publish in the UK in spring 2012.

In another pre-Fair deal, Viking editorial director Joel Rickett bought UK and Commonwealth rights to Eli Pariser's non-fiction title The Filter Bubble. The deal was through Natasha Fairweather at A P Watt, acting on behalf of US agent Elyse Cheney.

The title looks at how news is being filtered through sites such as Google and Facebook, as the internet becomes increasingly personalised and commercialised. Pariser is founder of campaigning sites MoveOn.org and Avaaz.com, and ran the social marketing for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

Rickett said: "The Filter Bubble could do for the internet what Felicity Lawrence and Eric Schlosser did for food, and Naomi Klein did for fashion. It takes developments that are all around us and makes them fresh and frighteningly real. Soon most of the news we see will simply reflect back
our own prejudices."

The Penguin imprint will publish in May 2011 simultaneously with Penguin Press in the US.

• Charlotte Williams
• Frankfurt Book Fair
• Rights deal
• Viking