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Granta Books has acquired an "innovative and deeply moving" family memoir, told through a series of lists.
Editorial director Laura Barber acquired world English rights to Elisabeth’s Lists by Lulah Ellender on an exclusive submission from Natalie Galustian at D H H Literary Agency for publication in spring 2018.
When Ellender inherited her grandmother’s handwritten book of lists, she found two decades’ worth of everyday notes: the routine ‘to do’s of running a household, details of clothes to be ordered and packed for foreign trips, shopping lists for parties. From these ordinary fragments, she has pieced together an "extraordinary portrait" of the grandmother she never knew: an ambassador’s daughter who lived in 1930s China, married a diplomat and led a glamorous, nomadic existence in far-flung corners of the globe between and during the wars. But as well as the story of finding her grandmother, Ellender’s debut also records the gradual loss of her mother, and explores the way we reach to lists to make sense of the chaos of our lives and, when the time comes, to ‘lasso our grief’.