You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Fourth Estate has triumphed in a five-way auction for a “life affirming” début novel by Sanam Mahloudji.
Kishani Widyaratna, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, in physical, e-book and audio to The Persians from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander. It will publish in spring 2024 as a lead title for the publisher.
North American rights went to Kara Watson at Scribner in a pre-empt and to Piper in Germany at auction. There were also pre-empts by Holland’s Ambo Anthos, Hungary’s Europa and from Fraktura in Croatia.
The synopsis explains: “When a family vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Auntie Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by her niece Bita, something radically shifts in the women descended from a famous Valiat ancestor. These women could not be more dissimilar: from the regal, elder matriarch, Elizabeth; to her daughters, the quietly rebellious Auntie Seema and the outrageous Auntie Shirin; to their young daughters, studious Bita and armchair revolutionary Niaz. Scattered between Iran and the US, as they move from the courtyard compounds and underground parties of Tehran to the waxing salons of New York and the suburban mansions of LA, each woman is beginning to consider their world afresh. Might there be more to life than they had ever realised? But, will they be able to weather the storm of change together?”
Widyaratna said: “As cuttingly funny as it is full of heart, ambitious in its telling and unbearably life-like, The Persians took the whole team at Fourth Estate by storm. In her debut novel, Sanam Mahloudji delivers a wonderfully spiky anatomy of family dysfunction and a moving portrait of the end of a way of life. It is a divine pleasure from beginning to end and I can’t wait for readers to meet Elizabeth Valiat and the unforgettable women in her family.”
Mahloudji was born in Tehran and grew up in Los Angeles after leaving Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Her fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Kenyon Review, the Idaho Review, Passages North and elsewhere. She was nominated for a 2018 PEN/Robert J Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her first published story.
She said: “I was calling Kishani Widyaratna the editor of my first novel even before it was official. From our first meeting, the Fourth Estate team had an understanding of me and my work that felt exactly right and I cannot wait to share The Persians with readers in the UK. It is an absolute honour and a dream to be joining a family of writers I feel like I’ve always loved and admired.”