Poet Deborah Landau’s ‘daring’ debut novel signed by Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury Trade has acquired poet Deborah Landau’s debut novel, Red Life. Head of Bloomsbury Trade Alexis Kirschbaum acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, including audio, excluding Canada, in an exclusive submission from Claire Conrad at Janklow & Nesbit. Graywolf will publish in the US with publication set for spring 2028.
The novel follows Nina, a 39‑year‑old New Yorker trapped in a marriage of numbing routine. When she leaves her husband under the pretence of a writing fellowship, she travels to Paris seeking transformation, emotionally, creatively and sexually. What unfolds is a heady summer of obsession, excess and self-exploration as Nina embarks on an intense affair while unravelling her former life.
Bloomsbury describes the book as “bold, sensual and philosophically charged” and a “searing feminist quest for freedom, asking what it means to take oneself all the way to the brink in order to feel truly, terrifyingly alive”.
Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons (Corsair), which was named one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic and the New York Review of Books among other publications. She is a professor at NYU, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.
She said: “It’s a dream to be working with Alexis Kirschbaum at Bloomsbury on Red Life, my first novel. The book is a meditation on marriage, mortality and desire that extends the preoccupations of my poetry – Eros, Thanatos, the pleasures and complexities of living in a female body as time passes.”
Kirschbaum said: “Deborah’s novel is challenging and daring and takes its place among a tradition of novels in the feminist canon I love so much that have gone on to define and change how we view a woman’s sense of self. Sentence by sentence, she writes with the inventiveness of a poet driven by a need to describe a new world. I’m thrilled to welcome Deborah Landau to Bloomsbury Trade.”
