Fitzcarraldo Editions buys Rey Conquer’s debut amid international rights frenzy
Fitzcarraldo Editions has bought Queen Mary University of London academic Rey Conquer’s debut novel How to Live Together.
The indie press’ editor Charlotte Jackson acquired world rights directly from the author, whose novel, Fitzcarraldo says, is about “the slipperiness of the encounter between self and other”. Michael Heyward, publisher at Text, acquired Australian and New Zealand rights and world Spanish and Catalan rights were pre-empted by Anagrama just ahead of the London Book Fair earlier this month. Additionally, Gabriella Doob, senior editor at Ecco, pre-empted North American rights, to be published simultaneously with Fitzcarraldo in spring 2027. The book was shortlisted for the 2024 Novel Prize.
The unnamed narrator of How to Live Together moves into a house to cat-sit, seeking solitude and relief from the complications of living with others only to discover that the cats present their own challenges. Fitzcarraldo said: “As the narrator begins to filter their life through their changing attitude to the cats, they become foils for the narrator’s failed relations with humans: the former student with whom they develop an erotic obsession, the colleague whose effortless boyish masculinity they envy...
“The house and its surroundings are alternately menacing and promising; the floodwaters of the Thames rise and fall, sucking the city down into the silt, the natural world becoming uncanny and grotesque.”
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Conquer is the author of an academic monograph on German poetry and was inaugural translator-in-residence at Holocaust Centre North. They teach German and film part-time at Queen Mary University of London.
Jackson said: “Rey’s writing immediately captivated me for the exactitude of its language and revelatory quality of thought. Almost every sentence of How to Live Together contains an idea that generates a jolt in the reader, like a door swinging open in the mind, and closes in on the point where thought and feeling meet.
“This work achieves something rare in fiction: to be at once philosophical and rooted in life – and political, too – in its artful probing of gender, precarity, class, desire and love, all of which stem from a fundamental question: what does it mean to exist with others? It’s a real honour to be working with Rey Conquer on their debut novel and to welcome them to the Fitzcarraldo Editions list.”
Heyward said: “How to Live Together is a remarkable book. Rey Conquer thrillingly explores the relationships between self and others, between self and self, between what we desire and what we fear. This is a powerfully physical and sensuous book about the world, but with its fine and sinuous sentences it lays clear the subtle and often contradictory threads of thinking itself. This is writing of a high order. Its dramatisation of the self is at once enthralling and relentless, uninhibited and painstaking. The narrator lays bare all their uncertainties and vulnerabilities.”
