Walker wooed by Kelly McCaughrain’s ‘breakout’ YA speculative romance
Walker Books has signed award-winning Irish author Kelly McCaughrain’s YA speculative romance, Just Another Dead Boy, which is pitched as ‘Adam Silvera meets Romeo & Juliet’.
Senior editor Lucy Earley acquired world all-language rights from Kirsty McLachlan at Morgan Green Creatives, in a deal that will see McCaughrain published in the UK and the US for the first time.
The book is set in a world where everyone knows the date they will die and follows wild-child Regan who works for the Romeo & Juliet Service, hired by parents to provide the illusion of star-crossed romance to rich boys on their way out. Over-achieving Jude Daly sees through the set-up, but they agree to a fake relationship for the sake of Jude’s parents and Regan’s job. As mutual contempt turns into something else, news breaks of the first ever Death Date survivor.
McCaughrain said: “To me, negotiating adolescence always felt like a balancing act between hedonism and profound issues, so this mash-up of love and death, fate and fake dating, made Just Another Dead Boy the most exciting concept I’ve ever worked on.”
Earley commented: “Just Another Dead Boy is sure to be Kelly’s YA breakout book; it’s a heady, high-stakes speculative romance which asks big questions about love and death, life and how to live it. It’s for fans of Adam Silvera meets Romeo & Juliet, with a dash of The White Lotus, and we’re excited to be publishing Kelly in both the UK and the US for the first time.”
Shannon Cullen, publishing director at Walker, added: “To have a writer of Kelly’s calibre taking on the moral question of made-to-order star-crossed lovers with a race against the clock is a real treat for readers, and the interest in this title ahead of Bologna matches our own huge enthusiasm for Just Another Dead Boy.”
McCaughrain won an unprecedented hat-trick of awards at the 2019 Children’s Books Ireland Awards for her debut, Flying Tips for Flightless Birds. Her YA novel, Little Bang, is currently shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Writing 2025 and the Children’s Books Ireland Awards 2025. She was the Queen’s University Belfast Children’s Writing Fellow for Northern Ireland 2019-21.
Just Another Dead Boy will be published in June 2026 alongside a global marketing and PR campaign.
