Brazen pre-empts French bestseller The Wet Nurse
Brazen, part of the Octopus Publishing Group, has acquired The Wet Nurse by Séverine Cressan, translated by Sam Taylor.
Publisher Romilly Morgan pre-empted world all-language rights, excluding France, from Juliette Ponce at Editions Dalva. Liese Mayer, executive editor at Little, Brown, made a pre-empt for North American rights overnight. The publisher said rights director Emma Thawley is fielding a "huge amount of interest" in other territories. Brazen and Little, Brown will publish simultaneously in May 2027.
"The Wet Nurse is a literary Gothic debut with a propulsive plot that follows Sylvaine as she discovers an abandoned baby, only a few hours old, in a clearing and beside it, a notebook," the synopsis says. "She is compelled to take the foundling and raise it alongside the one in her care. But when one baby dies suddenly in the night, Sylvaine decides to permanently switch it for the other. A mother for a mother. A mouth for a mouth."
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The blurb adds: "What appears at first to be a tale of the wet nurse soon gathers velocity, galloping between the decision Sylvaine has made and the lie she must keep and another unfolding story, one found in the pages of the notebook left by the newborn of a young farm girl impregnated by her master."
Morgan said: "I had that feeling. That indescribable gut wrench, nervous flutter about The Wet Nurse as soon as a French editor told me about it at London Book Fair. I knew instinctively I had to publish it."
Cressan added: "How incredibly lucky I feel to know my work will be read in the UK and the US! I never could have imagined such a fate for my first novel."
