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Headline’s Tinder Press imprint has acquired Hero by Katie Buckley, a "provocative, smart and darkly funny" debut novel about sex, myth and the patriarchy unfolding after a marriage proposal.
Publisher Mary-Anne Harrington acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Chris Wellbelove at Aitken Alexander, and the book will be published in January 2025.
The synopsis says: "Hero has been given a week to decide by her partner whether to accept. In the week that follows she writes him a story. It is both the story of how they fell in love and of who she is, and why marriage fills her with equal parts delight and terror. It explores the history of her own life and loves, and that she inherited from her parents. And it reaches back through centuries of legend and myth to interrogate whether, for women in particular, love and freedom are compatible."
Harrington commented: "Hero stopped me in its tracks from its dazzling opening pages – Katie Buckley has an incredibly arresting voice that is as at home depicting the tender sensuality of the first flush of love as it is skewering the long history of the patriarchy or challenging the assumptions on which our relationships are built. This is literary writing to lose your heart to, gorgeous and bracingly intelligent, which dares to ask the questions about happiness that keep us awake at night."
Buckley is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway, where she was a principal’s masters scholar, and a 2021/2022 London Library Emerging Writer.