W&N snaps up Gray’s 'boisterously funny' debut in lightning fast pre-empt

W&N has snapped up Madeleine Gray’s “boisterously funny” and “deeply moving” debut novel Green Dot in a lightning fast pre-empt. 

Publishing director Lettice Franklin acquired UK & Commonwealth rights to Green Dot from John Ash at PEW, on behalf of Grace Heifetz at Left Bank Literary. Ash submitted the novel on a Friday evening and Franklin had taken the novel off the table by the Monday morning that followed. It is due out in spring 2024.

US rights have been acquired by Caroline Zancan at Henry Holt in a pre-empt. Australian rights have been acquired by Kelly Fagan at Allen & Unwin also in a pre-empt. 

Green Dot is told by Hera, who is in her mid-twenties. She has spent the years since school trying to kick and scream into existence a life she cares about – but with little success so far. Then she meets Arthur, an older, married colleague. Intoxicated by the promise of ordinary happiness he seems to represent, Hera falls headlong into a workplace romance and a love story that will take the rest of the novel to tell.  

Franklin said: “I don’t think I have ever acquired a book as quickly as this one. From the moment I read its first page, I was simultaneously smitten and very, very anxious about the prospect of not publishing it. It has the boisterous humour, the life-affirming intimacy, the vulnerable confessions of a conversation had on a Friday afternoon when the boss is away. It made me laugh out loud over and over again.

“It moved me deeply in its portrait of the particular heady obsession of a workplace crush and in its exploration of why a woman becomes – and chooses to stay – the other woman. As I read I thought about many of my favourite writers – Katherine Heiny, David Sedaris, Raven Leilani, Meg Mason, Halle Butler, Patricia Lockwood, Naoise Dolan – and Madeleine’s name now sits on that list. All of us at W&N and Orion are completely obsessed with this novel and cannot believe our luck to be publishing it. We are beaming.”

Gray, a writer and critic from Sydney, said: “I wrote Green Dot as I was doing my UK PhD remotely from Sydney due to the pandemic, and as  I was  working in a bookstore where my colleagues and I were unionising. Writing this book became like a salve. I wrote to make myself laugh, and to make sense of the world that young people, and young women especially, now find ourselves in. The  green dot  of the title refers to the green dot on social media, showing which users are online. A lot of the romance in the novel plays  out over IM and  texts, and at times across countries. The green  dot is also a Gatsby reference— sue me— about the allure of  waiting for something that promises nothing.”

Ash added: “A few paragraphs into Green Dot, I knew I was reading something incredibly special, fresh and exciting. I couldn’t be more delighted that Madeleine’s hilarious, sharp, profound and painfully relatable novel has found the very best of homes with Lettice Franklin at W&N.”