You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
William Heinemann has acquired a non-fiction title about “desk killers” by Dan Gretton.
Senior editor Tom Avery signed UK and Commonwealth rights for I, You, We, Them: Journeys into the Mind of the Desk Killer, which has been fifteen years in the making, from Jessica Woollard of the Marsh Agency.
Avery said: “I, You, We, Them is a project that is unprecedented in its scope and ambition – part history, part memoir, part philosophical enquiry – encompassing revelatory examinations of the Holocaust, colonial genocides and the practices of Western corporations in the developing world today, as well as meditations on memory, love, friendship, walking, suffering, empathy, death and joy.”
He added: “There are echoes here of Primo Levi and W G Sebald, both in its moral rigour and in its resonance, but it is ultimately unlike anything I’ve ever read. It is a work that will profoundly change those who experience it.”
I, You, We, Them looks at the role of ‘desk killers’, the men and women who, working from their offices and computers, never see the faces of those they kill. It highlights the psychology and behaviour of these white-collar perpetrators of genocides and the collaboration between corporations and the state, according to the publisher.
Gretton is a writer, activist and teacher, and co-founder of political arts organisation PLATFORM.
I, You, We, Them will be published in hardback in 2015, followed by a paperback edition in 2016.