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Riverrun has pounced for Cat Brushing, a collection of stories by 80-year-old debut author Jane Campbell, in a two-book deal.
Editor Jasmine Palmer bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Eleanor Birne at PEW Literary.
The collection started life with “Cat Brushing”, a story she wrote in 2017 and speculatively sent off to the London Review of Books. Mary-Kay Wilmers and Alice Spawls published it in the paper two weeks later. She has since published stories in Granta online and in the London Magazine.
Campbell said: “It is a great privilege to be offered a two-book deal by riverrun, an imprint of Quercus. This journey only began in 2017 with the London Review of Books and I am now looking forward enormously to working with the riverrun team on the collected short stories and on the subsequent novel.”
The author grew up in Africa and read English at Oxford. She has worked as a group analyst, teaching and training and lecturing internationally, for nearly 40 years. Cat Brushing will be published by riverrun in July 2022 and The Wedding, a novel about three generations of women that spans a period beginning in the Second World War and ending in the present day, will follow.
Palmer commented: “I read Jane’s collection in one astonished rush—it’s transgressive, otherworldly and hilarious in all the right places, and by the time I found the last page I needed to discuss it with my colleagues. Cat Brushing is a force: in poignant and glaring prose it reframes the intellectual and emotional lives of older women, their desires, memories, freedoms and losses. This is an overwhelmingly accomplished debut.”
Publisher Jon Riley added: “Each of the 13 women whose provocative and compelling voices are conjured by Jane Campbell has a story to tell. Each one is worth listening to with the utmost attention.”