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Fourth Estate has scooped a “beautiful” debut novel from poet and performer Oisín McKenna in a four-way auction.
Katie Bowden, editorial director, bought UK and Commonwealth rights to Evenings and Weekends from Olivia Maidment at The Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency in a two-book deal. US rights were sold in a five-way auction to Jessica Vestuto at Mariner, HarperCollins, which will publish the book in 2024.
The book is set over one “feverish heatwave weekend” in London when a whale is beached on the banks of the Thames. It is described by the publisher as “an addictive, multi-generational story about a group of friends and their families as they navigate rolling news headlines, messy, queer relationships, precarious living situations and dead-end jobs”. By the end of a transformative two days, their lives will be changed forever.
Bowden said: “Part literary soap-opera, part state-of-the-nation novel, part movingly relatable drama, Evenings and Weekends is a beautiful, page-turning story about what it means to live and love in Britain today. These characters’ stories are painfully recognisable to anyone trying to build a life in a 21st-century city and to anyone living for the evenings and the weekends. Oisín McKenna is an incredibly exciting new talent and we are so proud to be publishing him at Fourth Estate.”
McKenna added: “I wanted to capture a specific place and time: London, England, in the summer of 2019. I wanted to write about how the political and ecological turning points of that year intersected with the intimate emotional lives of the people who lived through it, and to write about it in a way that was funny, warm and charged with the manic energy of the city in a heatwave. It’s an absolute dream to be able to work with Katie, Jessica, and the teams at Fourth Estate and Mariner, and I’m so grateful to the hard work of Olivia Maidment and the team at The Madeleine Milburn Agency for getting me to this point.”