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A new novel from Man Booker Prize-winner Penelope Lively leads David Higham Associates' hot books. How it All Began is about how a minor incident sparks a chain of events, derailing several lives. Fig Tree will publish in the UK in November and Viking has US rights. Lessons in Laughing Out Loud by Rowan Coleman is also on offer, a book about an obese woman in her 30s forced to confront her childhood in the events following the return of her one-time stepdaughter. Arrow will publish in the UK in August and Gallery publish in the US in February 2012. Rights to Walker Books' UK title, Daylight Saving by Edward Hogan, are also available. The ghost story is about an unhappy teenager who meets a mysterious girl on holiday whose watch ticks backwards. Candlewick holds US rights.
The Christopher Little Agency is offering international rights to Second World War memoir The Blue Door by Norwegian writer Lise Kristensen about her horrific experience of being detained as a young child with her family in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Pan Macmillan has UK and Commonwealth rights and will publish in spring 2012.
PFD is selling rights to Lynda Gratton's The Shift, which examines how the world of work is changing. It has already been sold in the UK (HarperCollins), Germany (Hanser), the Netherlands (Het Spectrum), Portugal (Dom Quixote), South Korea (KPL), Taiwan (Commonwealth Publishing) and Russia (Alpina). Norman Stone's Turkey: A Short History has already been sold in the UK to Thames & Hudson, to Basic Books in the US and to AST in Russia. Max Hastings' depiction of life during the Second World War, All Hell Let Loose, is also on offer. It has been sold in the UK (HarperCollins), US (Knopf), Spain (Critica) and in Hebrew to Modan. Doubleday is publishing Marius Brill's How to Forget in the UK, a part-mystery, part-love story between a disgraced children's magician and a con artist. Also in fiction, rights to Nicola Doherty's The Leading Man, a commercial début, are available. Headline holds UK rights, Blanvalet in Germany and Mondadori in Italy. PFD is also selling rights to Lucy Lord's Revelry, the first in a trilogy about social thirtysomethings. HarperCollins has UK rights.
Among Rogers, Coleridge & White's hot books is Kate Summerscale's follow-up to The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Also about Victorian life, The Diary of Mrs Robinson details the secret passions and the repercussions of their discovery of the eponymous subject. Rights have been sold to Bloomsbury (UK), Walker & Co (US), Berlin Verlag (Germany) and Bourgois (France). Orlando Figes will detail a forbidden love story in one of Stalin's notorious gulags in Something More Than Love. Penguin has UK rights and Metropolitan in the US. Julie Myerson's apocalyptic novel set in a frozen London, Then, has been bought by Cape, with publication set for June 2011. Tim Parks' comedy set in a Buddhist retreat, The Server, is also being touted. Harvill Secker has UK rights. Italian rights are being handled by the Marco Vigevani Literary Agency. Francesca Segal's satirical début, Temple Fortune, is set in a north-west London Jewish community. It is under offer in the UK, with Hyperion buying US rights and HarperCollins buying Canadian.
United Agents is taking Danny Wallace's début novel to the fair. Ebury has UK rights to Charlotte Street, a London-based romantic comedy. Also on offer is début The Heretic's Secretary by Jonathan Bonser, with its setting varying from Renaissance Italy to the Brazilian Amazon. Short Books is publishing Sofka Zinovieff's début novel, The House on Paradise Street, in the UK, an exploration of three generations of Grecian women spanning the past 70 years. Psichogios has Greek rights. Another début is Richard Bingham's Flesh and Blood (Orion, UK rights). It is set in Brighton, where an ambitious detective sergeant is confronted by his troubled past. Michael Joseph has UK rights to What the Nanny Saw by Fiona Neill. The book is about a woman who comes to work for a privileged London family but becomes embroiled in a scandal. It has been sold to Riverhead in the US and Bruna in the Netherlands.
A young adult paranormal mystery series by "Twin Peaks" co-creator Mark Frost is among Ed Victor's picks. Random House bought US rights to three books in the Will West: The Epic series at auction. The Paladin Protocol will be published in autumn 2012. Edna O'Brien's memoir, Country Girl, is also being touted with Faber holding UK rights and Little, Brown holding US. Both will publish in 2012. "Oliver Twist meets The Matrix" is how Eoin Colfer's new series is being billed. Puffin will publish W.A.R.P. in summer 2012. The agency has signed translation deals in France (La Martiniere Jeunesse), Germany (Luebbe), Italy (Bompiani) and Poland (Nasza Ksiegarnia) for Will Hill's young adult trilogy about a shadowy government agency. A Brazilian deal is currently under negotiation. The first book, Department 19, is published in the UK (HarperCollins) and the US (Razorbill) this month. Catherine Mayer's Amortality, about how modern society attempts to live agelessly, is published by Vermillion in the UK next month.
At WME, Matthew Pearl's novel The Technologists is available. The thriller, about a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 19th Century, has been sold to Random House in the US and Harvill Secker in the UK. "Self-help meets The Devil Wears Prada" is how a début novel by Ben Schrank, an editor at Penguin US imprint Razorbill, is being billed. FSG has US rights. In non-fiction, David Finch's memoir The Journal of Best Practices (Scribner US) is on offer. The book's roots are in the New York Times' Modern Love column. WME is also touting Emily Oster's Pregnancy by Numbers, "a Freakonomics take on pregnancy". Orion has UK rights and Penguin Press has US rights. The agency is also selling rights to Angelica Huston's memoir with Scribner publishing in the US and Simon & Schuster in the UK.
Martin Amis' latest book, Lionel Asbo: State of England, is among the titles Andrew Wylie is selling at the fair. Cape holds UK rights with Knopf publishing in the US. A biography of George Harrison, Living in the Material World, is also on offer. The book is introduced by the Beatle's widow and is based on unpublished interviews with Harrison and those close to him. George Packer's biography of US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who has worked under every Democratic president from John F Kennedy to Barack Obama, is available. Richard Holbrooke and the American Eclipse is being published in the US by Knopf. Crown is publishing Anouk Markovits' non-fiction title about three generations of a Satmar fundamentalist family, I am Forbidden, in summer 2012. Rights are also on offer for Teju Col's Open City, a post-9/11 novel about an African émigré working as a psychiatrist. Random House publish in the US in February.