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Scribner has landed Brat, a “disquieting” ghost story and coming-of-age tale by début novelist Gabriel Smith.
Editorial director at the Simon & Schuster literary imprint Chris White acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Tracy Bohan at The Wylie Agency, in a “significant” two-book deal on exclusive submission. Brat will be published in hardback in spring 2024.
“Brat is a work of electrifying originality and bravura virtuosity; at once a dark and disquieting ghost story, a unique and brilliant meditation on grief, and a profoundly funny Bildungsroman in which the protagonist’s education is anything but sentimental,” the publisher said.
The novel tells the story of an aspiring writer dealing with the death of his father and the terminal illness of his mother. Suffering from an unidentified skin complaint, which leads his skin to peel off like a reptile, he can’t seem to stop offending relatives and family friends, often at considerable physical cost to himself.
The synopsis explains: “Escaping the spectre of the girlfriend who has left him and the literary agent chasing him for the novel he has not even started, he returns to his family home to prepare it to be sold. Alone in the house, his skin shedding in ever-increasing frequency and quantity, with nothing but benzos, booze and memories for company, things take an uncanny turn: a manuscript for a novel written by his mother keeps changing, an old home video is similarly unstable and may reveal unsettling secrets, the house is becoming encased in Russian vines and a man dressed as a deer keeps appearing in the back garden.
“While handling age-old themes of mortality, familial love and the impermanence of art, Brat is not quite like anything you’ve ever read before.”
White said: “I got in touch with Gabe having read one of his short stories online. It was an astonishingly accomplished piece of writing and I was eager to feast on more. The novel he sent me was Brat and it blew my mind. How could a new writer create something so taut, smart, confident and funny? Gabe is a writer who has been influenced by the greats but he has distilled them into something entirely his own, and that is enormously exciting.
“It’s almost impossible to convey in a few sentences quite how remarkable an achievement it is. I can only say that you’re going to have to read it to appreciate its brilliance and I’m afraid that most people are going to have wait until 2024. Batten down the hatches and brace yourself, though; a literary tornado is about to hit town!”
Smith is 27 and from London. His fiction has appeared in the Drift, New York Tyrant Magazine and the Moth. He was mentored by the late Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books, who edited and was to publish Smith’s début novel on his own imprint.
“This novel is particularly close to my heart: it belongs to my friend, editor and teenage idol, Giancarlo DiTrapano, as much as it does to me,” he said. “It’s terribly important to me that his memory – his work on it – reaches readers in the right way. I’m also aware that it’s a very strange novel, as you might expect for something that was destined for Gian’s imprint. I think Chris, and Scribner, are the ideal home for it. Chris is a very talented editor, and he and Scribner have been the perfect combination of brave and sensitive throughout. I’m very happy to be working with him.”