You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson has acquired a new novel titled Smoke, Soot & Ash and a sequel by Dan Vyleta.
Kirsty Dunseath, publishing director at W&N Fiction, and Jon Wood, deputy group publisher, bought UK and Commonwealth rights at auction from Angharad Kowal, m.d of Writers House UK, on behalf of Simon Lipskar, president of Writers House, New York.
Smoke, Soot & Ash opens in a private boarding school near Oxford, but this world has an alternative history to ours, where sin is a physical attribute and children are born carrying seeds of evil within them. In the school, two boys called Thomas and Charlie discover that the world of smoke, soot and ash is not as it seems, and they soon leave the confines of the school to enter into a struggle for the soul of their nation.
Lipskar said: “As an agent, you dream that one day the author you have believed in body and soul from your first encounter will produce a novel that you know, all the way down to your marrow, will be a blockbuster literary sensation. Last November Dan handed me 50 pages of something he said was entirely different from what had come before. And, from the very first page, I knew that Dan had produced that once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, the book that would change everything for him. I could feel the magic in every word.”
Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany. After growing up there, he moved to the UK, where he completed a PhD in history at King’s College Cambridge. His novel The Crooked Maid (Bloomsbury Circus) was a finalist for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
In the US, the two books were bought in a major pre-empt by Bill Thomas, editor-in-chief of Doubleday. HarperCanada, Vyleta’s Canadian publisher, has also bought Canadian rights to Smoke, Soot & Ash and its first sequel.
W&N will publish Smoke, Soot & Ash in spring 2016 in both hardback and e-book format.