Pan Fiction clinches The Bookshop Treasure Hunt by Rebecca Powell at auction
Clare Hey, publishing director at Pan Fiction, has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in The Bookshop Treasure Hunt by Rebecca Powell from Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton in a five-way auction.
North American rights have been acquired at auction by Pamela Dorman and Natalie Grant for Pamela Dorman Books at Viking/PRH US, handled by Sally Wofford-Girand at Union Literary on behalf of Greene & Heaton. Deborah Sun de la Cruz will publish at Penguin Canada.
Translation rights have been sold by Kate Rizzo of Greene & Heaton to dtv in Germany and Newton Compton in both Italy and Spain.
The blurb for the novel, scheduled for UK publication in spring 2028, reads: “Meet Izzy and her sister Margot; one is a verified book nerd, the other not so much. When they find an unfinished manuscript in the attic of their late mother’s mango farm in Queensland, Australia, and discover that their mother had a year abroad in the UK when she was a young student and, while there, embarked on an attempt to solve the famous Great British Bookshop Treasure Hunt of 1984, so begins an odyssey that will change everything.
“Margot is pregnant with her first child, so Izzy comes alone to the UK to visit all the bookshops on the treasure hunt trail and track down a mysterious boy in her mother’s past. She meets a group of book nerds and joins them on their ‘bookshop crawls’ around the UK, from Brighton to Cardiff to Hay-on-Wye to Bradford to Belfast to Edinburgh, while they help her to solve the clues they find in the bookshops. Along the way, Izzy comes to terms with the grief of losing her mother, misses Margot, and falls in love with a bookshop boy of her own.”
Hey said: “When Judith pitched this novel to me I loved the idea of it immediately. And then when I read it I loved it even more. It’s everything you would hope it to be and so much more: a love song to bookshops and book nerds everywhere, a story of friendship and love and recovering from grief. It’s uplifting and hopeful and just the tonic of escapism I love in a book.”
Powell said the idea of the treasure hunt came when she was “mooching around the bookshops of Cambridge with my daughter, although I didn’t start writing it until, like Izzy’s mother, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and started to think of all the untold stories we each carry in us; all the ’what ifs’ and missed connections.”“What if one person’s missed connection could bring together the people she loved, decades later, through books? Now, with my daughters, we use bookshop crawling as a way of exploring new cities (in the name of research, of course!),” she said. “Our most recent crawls have taken us through the streets of Bristol, London, Paris and Amsterdam. A highly recommended way of ‘accidentally’ sight-seeing!”
Murray added: “Like all great writers and storytellers, Rebecca is a great reader and lover of books and bookshops. Her novel is a love letter to readers and book lovers everywhere, and is a testament to how books and reading connect us all, and help us understand each other in a world where we need that more than ever.”
