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Old Street has acquired an "acerbic, really funny" New York Times bestseller for four figures with plans to rush it out this summer "to benefit from the buzz spreading across from the Atlantic".
Publisher Ben Yarde-Buller bought UK and Ireland rights to The Ask by Sam Lypsyte from agent Ira Silverberg from Sterling Lord Literistic last week, and will publish as a trade paperback on 8th June.
The book has been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US where it is riding high in the NYT bestseller list. Picador controls the rights in Australia.
"The UK is such a difficult market at the moment for literary fiction especially—the agent couldn't find a UK publisher," said Yarde-Buller. "We got in there just before this storm [of positive publicity] broke, so we were just in time.
"It's exciting for us and it's a reflection of the state that the market is in that a book of this quality isn't selling. The book is about as dark as you can get."
Lipsyte was previously published by HarperPerennial and Flamingo.