Doubleday bags Nick Bradley’s ‘ingenious’ third novel in exclusive submission
Doubleday editiorial director Bobby Mostyn-Owen has acquired Nick Bradley’s "big-hearted, visionary" third novel in an exclusive submission.
Mostyn-Owen, who has worked with Bradley since buying his 2020 debut while at Atlantic, inked a world English language deal to The Second Life of Professor Takahashi from Ed Wilson at Johnson & Alcock.
The novel is a story across four intertwining strands: a lonely professor, his restless daughter, the game she cannot stop playing and the woman who draws them together. The titular Professor Takahashi accepts a visiting post in a quiet English university town, hoping to close the widening gulf he feels between him and his teenage daughter, Kaori. But Kaori has found refuge in an unsettling video game, and the borders between reality and the virtual begin to blur.
Meanwhile, in the game, "a trench-coated Technician navigates a futuristic cyberpunk city with a robotic sidekick cat. They inhabit a world where ordinary people have chosen to live in their fantasies over reality… and then there is Elena: a young and gifted computer scientist; brilliant, bruised and searching for connection in all the wrong places".
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Mostyn-Owen called Bradley’s new book "bold and playful, it is an immersive, big-hearted, visionary novel about what it means to be seen, and what it costs to reach for someone across the silence".
Bradley was a long-time resident of Japan before moving back to the UK, where he now teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. His two previous novels – Four Seasons in Japan and The Cat and the City – were set in Tokyo. He holds a PhD in the figure of the cat in Japanese literature, and recently translated a new edition of Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat. In 2024 he was chosen by the British Council and the National Centre for Writing as one of 10 rising stars in UK writing.
Bradley said: “Working with [Mostyn-Owen] over the course of my three books has been an incredibly creative and fulfilling experience. I know that I would be nowhere without the support of booksellers and readers, and I am hugely excited to connect and reconnect with all those who take the time to engage with my work.”
