CONVILLE & WALSH LTD
RIGHTS GUIDE
0
SPRING 2014
Conville & Walsh Ltd.
SPRING 2014 RIGHTS GUIDE
Contents and Information
Fiction:
Non-fiction:
World Rights
Page 2
Page 35
Page 78
During the London Book Fair, Conville & Walsh will be at tables 5E, 5F, 5G and 14Q in the
Agents Centre.
For further information on all clients and titles in this catalogue, please write to Henna
Silvennoinen: henna@convilleandwalsh.com
Agent Names and Details:
Alex Christofi (APC) – alex@convilleandwalsh.com
Alexandra McNicoll (AFM) – alexandra@convilleandwalsh.com
Carrie Kania (CEK) – carriek@convilleandwalsh.com
Carrie Plitt (CMP) – carriep@convilleandwalsh.com
Clare Conville (CBC) – clare@convilleandwalsh.com
Henna Silvennoinen (HES) – henna@convilleandwalsh.com
Jake Smith-Bosanquet (JSB) – jake@convilleandwalsh.com
Patrick Walsh (PEW) – patrick@convilleandwalsh.com
Sophie Lambert (SAL) – sophie@convilleandwalsh.com
Susan Armstrong (SMA) – sue@convilleandwalsh.com
Finance Enquiries:
Dorcas Rogers – dorcas@convilleandwalsh.com
Conville & Walsh Ltd.
Haymarket House
28-29 Haymarket
London SW1Y 4SP
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7393 4200
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7393 4210
Mob: +44 (0) 7876 223 885
www.convilleandwalsh.com
1
Conville & Walsh Ltd.
Spring 2014 Rights Guide
FICTION
2
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE RUBY SLIPPERS
Keir Alexander
A triumphant debut. A magical and absorbing read with an unforgettable cast of
characters
– Angela Jackson, author of THE EMERGENCE OF JUDY TAYLOR
Old Rosa, the bag lady, shuffles along the streets of New York,
stinking, silent and shunned by society. Time and again her nephew,
Mr Marcinkus the grocer, has tried to help – but Rosa remains
unknowable, hushed inside her hulk.
On the day of the St Patrick’s Day Parade, Rosa is in a terrible
accident. While she lies in hospital, Mr Marcinkus visits her squalid
apartment and unearths something remarkable from her monstrous
piles of junk: two glittering ruby slippers, relics of Hollywood
history. How on earth does decrepit old Rosa come to own such
treasure? And what is to be done with it now?
Rosa’s ‘Ruby Millions’ soon become an irresistible beacon for the misplaced hopes and darkest
desires of an unforgettable cast of characters. But in the hunger to possess the prize, will anyone
stop to learn the incredible story of the woman to whom they once belonged?
THE RUBY SLIPPERS is a rare and moving fantasia of hidden treasures, forgotten histories, lost
connections, and our search for true meaning.
Keir Alexander was once an actor and stage manager before working in film as a writer and
director. He is now an English teacher living in Sussex where he plays cricket as often as he can.
This is his first novel.
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Corsair/Constable & Robinson
6 March 2014
432 pages
SMA
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
3
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE GROWN UPS
Robin Antalek
Robin Antalek’s debut is as haunting as it is gripping – a story of the events, both
mundane and dramatic, that tear a family apart; and of the often inexplicable love
that binds a family together. THE SUMMER WE FELL APART is a beautiful, memorable
novel
– Diana Spechler, author of WHO BY FIRE, on THE SUMMER WE FELL APART
Full of the best kind of heartache, THE SUMMER WE FELL APART is an unforgettable,
big-hearted debut that will make you want to pick up the phone and call your own
brother or sister
– Will Allison, author of WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT, on THE SUMMER WE FELL
APART
Sam Turner’s fifteenth summer is a revelation. He receives the flirtatious attention of the girl next
door, Suzie Epstein, and his mother abandons their family without explanation. His older brother
Michael (a serious, studious freshman in college with big plans for his life) and their father (an
attorney) seem to accept her absence with no questions asked. Sam, however, feels adrift, and
struggles to understand how a person you thought would always be there can be suddenly and
inexplicably gone.
Over the years, the bonds that formed in childhood between Sam and his tight knit group of
friends prove to be remarkably resilient as they stumble into adulthood. In alternating voices, THE
GROWN UPS explores the deep connection that forms between friends as they navigate parents,
siblings, lovers, and each other.
Full of love, loss and laughter, THE GROWN UPS is a story about the circumstances and people
that influence, change and push you to discover not only the truth about each other, but who it is
that you really want to be when you grow up.
Robin Antalek is the author of THE SUMMER WE FELL APART (HarperCollins, 2010) which was
chosen as a Target Breakout Book, and for which translation rights are available and represented
by Conville & Walsh. Her non-fiction work has been published at The Weeklings, The Nervous
Breakdown and collected in THE BEAUTIFUL ANTHOLOGY, WRITING OFF SCRIPT: Writers on the
Influence of Cinema, THE WEEKLINGS: Revolution #1 Selected Essays 2012-1013. Her short fiction
has appeared in 52 Stories, Five Chapters, Sun Dog, The Southeast Review and Literary Mama
among others. http://www.robinantalek.com/
US Publisher
US Publication
Status
Length
Agent
William Morrow/HarperCollins
Autumn 2014
Edited manuscript
100,000 words approximately
CEK
All rights available excluding US
World English language rights: William Morrow/HarperCollins US
4
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE DISAPPEARANCE BOY
Neil Bartlett
A marvellous evocation of 1920s London... Compassionate, gentle, violent,
dynamic and a glorious page-turner
– Ruth Rendell on MR CLIVE & MR PAGE
SKIN LANE is a fiendishly taut little psycho-shocker that recalls Simenon at his
most hardboiled and Highsmith at her creepiest. It made the hairs rise on the
back of my neck and I still can’t get them down again
– Will Self on SKIN LANE
SKIN LANE welds itself to your hands from first to last. Textured, teeming with
menace and, at the end, deeply moving, it is an extremely fine piece of writing
– The Times on SKIN LANE
Reggie Rainbow has a secret – or rather, several. In fact, keeping
secrets is what he does for a living. As a child, growing up
orphaned on a strange dark beach of stones, Reggie kept his
head down and accepted whatever life threw at him. Now he is
twenty-three, and his curious profession has brought him back to
the seaside, this time to the tatty backstreets of Brighton.
As the town prepares for the Coronation celebrations of 1953, young Reggie is about to discover
that it’s time for him to confront some of the things he’s spent years keeping tucked away in the
dark.
Neil Bartlett’s fourth novel is both a loving recreation of a bizarre lost world – the backstage
corridors of a skin-and-sequins vaudeville theatre in the dog days of British variety – and a
deeply involving exploration of what it means to be a child, a lover, and a man.
By turns lyrically tender, fiercely unsettling and picturesquely entertaining, this is a major new work
by an utterly idiosyncratic talent.
Neil Bartlett is both an acclaimed novelist and a leading theatre director and performer. His first
book was a groundbreaking study of Oscar Wilde, WHO WAS THAT MAN (1988), which is now
recognised as a breakthrough work in the development of contemporary gay studies. His first
novel, READY TO CATCH HIM SHOULD HE FALL was published by Serpents Tail in 1996,
acclaimed by Gay Times as its Book of the Year, and translated into five European languages. His
second, MR CLIVE & MR PAGE, was longlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1996; his third, SKIN
LANE, was longlisted for the Costa Award in 2008. His work in the theatre started with a series of
performance pieces including his signature work A VISION OF LOVE REVEALED IN SLEEP (1988),
which he notoriously performed naked. In 1994, he was appointed Artistic Director of the Lyric
Hammersmith in London. Since leaving the Lyric in 2005 he has worked for (amongst others) the
National Theatre in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Manchester, Edinburgh,
Brighton and Aldeburgh Festivals. In 2000 he was awarded an OBE for his services to the theatre.
He lives in Brighton and London with his partner. http://www.neil-bartlett.com/
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury
October 2014
Edited manuscript
85,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
5
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE LAST BOAT HOME
Dea Brovig
A finely-written debut, as eloquent about mothers and daughters as it is about
men and women, with an immediacy to the writing that makes both time – then
and now – and place – a small Norwegian town – fully realised and tangibly
present
– Stella Duffy, author of STATE OF HAPPINESS
The evocation of place is wonderful; the writing fresh, the storytelling assured.
Dea Brovig vividly conjures up this Norwegian community and its terrible
secrets and repressions
– Jill Dawson, author of THE GREAT LOVER and LUCKY BUNNY
On the wind-swept southern coast of Norway, sixteen-year-old
Else is out fishing on the icy sea, dragging her oars through the
waves while, above her, storm clouds are gathering. Surrounded
by mountains, snow and white-capped water, she looks across the
fjord and dreams of another life, of escape and faraway lands.
Back on the shore, her father sits alone in his boathouse with a jar of homebrew. In the Best Room,
her mother covers her bruises and seeks solace in prayer. Each tries to hide the truth from this
isolated, God-fearing community they call home.
Until one night changes everything.
More than thirty years later, the return of an old friend forces Elsa to relive the events that marked
the end of her childhood.
Explosive, dark and tender, THE LAST BOAT HOME is a devastating novel about sacrifice, survival
and a mother’s love.
Dea Brovig moved to the UK from Norway at the age of seventeen. After graduating from Leeds
University, she worked in publishing in London for eight years. She graduated from UEA’s Creative
Writing MA in 2009. THE LAST BOAT HOME is her first novel.
http://www.deabrovig.com/ @DeaBrovig
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Hutchinson/Random House
13 March 2014
272 pages
SAL
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Norway (Aschehoug)
6
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
A TRIPLE KNOT
Emma Campion
[A] touching and beautiful story
– Catholic Herald on THE KING’S MISTRESS
A colourful and historically detailed saga
– Seattle Times on THE KING’S MISTRESS
Campion stays true to the facts of Alice’s life as the mistress of Edward III, the mother of
his son John, and a successful businesswoman. This is a detailed rendering of Edward III’s
court, one that provides an empathetic but realistic portrait of a colorful and, if
Campion is to be believed, misunderstood woman
– Publishers Weekly on THE KING’S MISTRESS
The critically acclaimed author of THE KING’S MISTRESS brings another
fascinating woman from history to life in an enthralling story of political
intrigue, personal tragedy, and illicit love.
Joan of Kent, the renowned beauty and niece of King Edward III, seems blessed with a life of royal
privilege until her father is executed for treason and she becomes a ward of the king, living
amongst those who deem her the daughter of a traitor. Joan begins to understand the brutal
constraints and dangers inherent in being of royal blood.
There is a man at court who loves her, but his love proves the greatest threat of all.
As an impetuous teenager, she escapes into a clandestine marriage in a bid for freedom, but then
must hide it for nearly a decade, as her guardians marry her off to another man. After her first
husband’s death, Joan – now a mother of four – enters into another scandalous relationship, this
time with the heir to the British throne, Prince Edward, hero of Crécy and Poitiers, who has loved
her all along.
But his devotion comes at a terrible price. Haunted by nightmares of her father’s execution and the
ruthlessness of her royal kin, Joan must reconcile her passion for the crown prince with the
potentially tragic costs of a royal life.
Emma Campion studied for a PhD in Medieval and Anglo-Saxon literature and has continued
to read, research and lecture on medieval history and literature ever since. She has previously
published a series of medieval novels under a different name. As with Emma’s first novel,
THE KING’S MISTRESS (Century, 2009; Crown, 2010), A TRIPLE KNOT, and the planned
sequel, THE HERO’S WIFE, will appeal to readers of Philippa Gregory and Alison Weir.
http://www.emmacampion.com/
US Publisher
US Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Crown Publishing
July 2014
Edited manusript
120,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding US, Italy (Piemme)
7
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
COLOSSUS
Alexander Cole
A fantastic read
– Wilbur Smith
Babylon, 323 BC. A war elephant, Colossus, rampages through
Alexander’s camp and the only one who can control it is a fiercely
ambitious mahout called Gajendra. Having saved Alexander from a
deadly poison plot, Gajendra is made captain of the war elephants.
Meanwhile in Carthage, Alexander’s next conquest, Mara – daughter of
the general defending the city – has withdrawn from the world. She has
lost her entire family, and decides to face the world anew disguised as a
boy.
Gajendra saves Mara from the city’s destruction. Fooled by her disguise, he keeps her as a minion
and soon has the young princess mucking out the animals. As Mara develops a deep and
unexpected friendship with the monstrous elephant, Colossus, she begins to find the will to live
again. Gajendra in turn discovers Mara’s secret, and falls in love with her.
On the eve of the apocalyptic battle with Rome, Gajendra must choose between Mara and
Alexander. Should he risk everything for her? Or should he forfeit his humanity for ambition and
take his chance to rule?
Alexander Cole was born in north London. He has been a full time novelist for the last twenty
years, writing under a different name, with his work so far translated into seventeen languages. He
travels regularly to research his novels and his quest for authenticity has led him to run with the
bulls in Pamplona, pursue tornadoes across Oklahoma, go cage shark diving in South Africa, be
tear-gassed in La Paz, and complete a 1000km walk of the Camino in Spain. He is currently living
in Barcelona with his family.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Corvus/Atlantic Books
St. Martin’s Press
2 January 2014
400 pages
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Italy (Newton Compton), Macedonia (Kultura), Spain (Boveda)
8
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
TURNING THE STONES
Debra Daley
Georgian England, mid-eighteenth century.
As a foundling the young Em Smith is brought to the Cheshire country
home of the ambitious Waterland family, where she serves as a
companion to their daughter, Eliza.
But as they grow up, Em’s position becomes uncertain and she is
increasingly troubled by the mystery of her birth. When Eliza goes in
pursuit of a husband and a fortune in London, Em finds herself
implicated in a horrific crime and must flee for her life.
Her frantic escape takes her across country and onto the high seas,
where she is at the mercy of the enigmatic smuggler, Captain
McDonagh.
But there is a more potent force drawing Emily on: a spirit whose presence she has felt all her life,
and whose irresistible design – be it malicious or benevolent – will force her onwards to a distant
shore. There she will confront the astonishing secret of her origin.
Debra Daley is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Born in New Zealand, she has also
worked as an editor, copywriter and journalist in the UK and New Zealand.
http://debradaleyauthor.tumblr.com/ @ddaleyauthor
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Heron/Quercus
3 April 2014
432 pages
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
9
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
MR MAC AND ME
Esther Freud
I loved LUCKY BREAK – being taken away and plunged into that vivid
group of actors with all their fun and excitement – and of course their
tensions, disappointments and anxiety too. It struck me as completely
authentic and enthralling
– Sir Michael Holroyd on LUCKY BREAK
Freud stands out as a clear, attractive voice in the literary hubbub
– Observer on LUCKY BREAK
In a culture which dins with brashness and self-advertisement, attending to
Esther Freud’s still, truthful voice becomes not only a pleasure but a
necessity
– Jonathan Coe, author of THE ROTTERS’ CLUB on LUCKY BREAK
It is 1914, and Thomas Maggs, the son of the local publican,
lives with his parents and sister in a village on the Suffolk coast.
He is the youngest child, and the only son surviving. Life is quiet –
shaped by the seasons, fishing and farming, the summer visitors,
and the girls who come down from the Highlands every year to
gut and pack the herring.
Then one day a mysterious Scotsman arrives. To Thomas he looks for all the world like a detective,
in his black cape and hat of felted wool, and the way he puffs on his pipe as if he’s Sherlock
Holmes. Mac is what the locals call him when they whisper about him in the Inn. And whisper they
do, for he sets off on his walks at unlikely hours, and stops to examine the humblest flowers. He is
seen on the beach, staring out across the waves as if he’s searching for clues. But Mac isn’t a
detective, he’s the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and together with his red haired artist wife,
they soon become a source of fascination and wonder to Thomas.
Yet just as Thomas and Mac’s friendship begins to blossom, war with Germany is declared. The
summer guests flee and are replaced by regiments of soldiers on their way to Belgium, and as the
brutality of war weighs increasingly heavily on this coastal community, they become more
suspicious of Mac and his curious behaviour.
In this tender and compelling story of an unlikely friendship, Esther Freud paints a vivid portrait of
a home front community during the First World War, and of a man who was one of the most
brilliant and misunderstood artists of his generation. It is her most beautiful and masterful work.
Esther Freud was born in London in 1963. She trained as an actress before writing her first novel,
HIDEOUS KINKY, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and made into a feature
film starring Kate Winslet. Her other novels include THE SEA HOUSE, SUMMER AT GAGLOW, THE
WILD, PEERLESS FLATS, LOVE FALLS and most recently, LUCKY BREAK. Her books have been
translated into thirteen languages. http://www.estherfreud.co.uk/ @estherfreudrite
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury
September 2014
90,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Canada (Penguin), Germany (under offer), Netherlands (under
offer)
10
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
INFIDELITIES
Kirsty Gunn
THE BIG MUSIC, its charms as subtle as a piper's grace notes, brilliantly fulfils its own
definition
– Adam Thorpe, Guardian on THE BIG MUSIC
I cannot think of a more entirely original, enchanting and enchanted book
– Michael Bywater, Independent on THE BIG MUSIC
Remarkable... Gunn is to be applauded for her ambition – and for making this reader,
at least, not just open to the idea of bagpipe music but eager to try out her newly
informed ears
– Susan Elderkin, Financial Times on THE BIG MUSIC
This novel, like the music it emulates, is thunderous, dissonant and beautiful. It
certainly won’t be for everyone. True to form, it can also be uncomfortable and
repetitive and sometimes irritating. But if you surrender to its size, soak up the
complexities of its rhythms and themes, then it triumphs
– Lucy Atkins, The Sunday Times on THE BIG MUSIC
For there, marked like viscera, was a smear of dark across the sheet, gone from the middle right down
to the bed’s depth, and for a minute Helen thought her daughter was right, the slippery colour of it,
the thick, womblike consistency in the dark, old and womanly and primal, matter come from deep
within herself… That it really was blood. In the dark that’s how it looked. But it was the mud from her
feet, from where she’d been, what she’d been doing, that was in the bed with her – although it could
have been blood, Helen realises, years and years later. May as well have been.
What are the lies we tell to those we love? What secrets do we hold close that then change us
forever?
In this quietly shocking series of short stories, Kirsty Gunn explores the dangerous terrain that opens
up within marriages, friendships and family life when the truth is exposed for what it is – a
powerful, seductive force that can take us far away from all that is familiar.
Kirsty Gunn is the author of five novels: RAIN, THE KEEPSAKE, FEATHERSTONE, THE BOY AND THE
SEA and, most recently, THE BIG MUSIC. She has also written a collection of short stories, THIS
PLACE YOU RETURN TO IS HOME, and 44 THINGS, a collection of essays, fragments and stories.
She is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes including the Scottish Arts Council Bursary
for Literature, the New York Times Notable Book award and, in 2007, Sundial Scottish Arts Council
Book of the Year. She is also Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee
where she created and directs the program. Kirsty is married with two daughters and lives in
London and Scotland. THE BIG MUSIC won Book of the Year at the 2013 New Zealand Post Book
Awards. http://www.kirsty-gunn.com/
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Faber & Faber
November 2014
Unedited manuscript
60,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
11
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
ECHO BOY
Matt Haig
THE HUMANS is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable
and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin
– Jeanette Winterson on THE HUMANS
Excellent... Very human and touching
– Patrick Ness, author of THE CRANE WIFE, on THE HUMANS
A brilliant exploration of what it is to love, and to be human, The Humans is
both heartwarming and hilarious, weird, and utterly wonderful. One of the best
books I've read in a very long time
– S J Watson, author of BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, on THE HUMANS
Audrey’s father taught her that to stay human in the modern
world, she had to build a moat around herself; a moat of books
and music, philosophy and dreams. A moat that makes Audrey
different from the echoes: sophisticated, emotionless machines,
built to resemble humans and to work for human masters.
Daniel is an echo – but he’s not like the others. He feels a connection with Audrey; a feeling Daniel
knows he was never designed to have, and cannot explain. And when Audrey is placed in terrible
danger, he’s determined to save her.
ECHO BOY is a powerful story about love, loss and what makes us truly human.
Matt Haig is the author of novels for both adults and children. His adult novels include the
bestsellers THE LAST FAMILY IN ENGLAND, the film rights of which were sold to Brad Pitt, and THE
RADLEYS, which was a TV Book Club ‘Best Read’. His latest adult novel, THE HUMANS, has been
chosen as a 2014 World Book Night title. His first novel for children, Shadow Forest, won numerous
awards including the Gold Smarties Award and the Blue Peter Book of the Year. It was also
shortlisted for the Waterstones’ Children’s Book of the Year prize. The Guardian summed up his
writing as ‘delightfully weird’ and The New York Times called him ‘a writer of great talent’. His
works have been translated into over 30 languages. He was recently Booktrust’s Writer
in Residence and has over 40,000 followers on Twitter. http://www.matthaig.com/ @matthaig1
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
The Bodley Head/Random House
27 March 2014
416 pages
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
Translation rights: The Bodley Head/Random House
12
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE WOLF BORDER
Sarah Hall
Chosen by Granta magazine as one of 2013’s Best Young British Novelists
These stories... constantly thwart one’s dramatic expectations – and are all the more
dramatic for it. This prose... is wonderful
– The Times on THE BEAUTIFUL INDIFFERENCE
Seductively oblique, beautifully poetic, wholly absorbing... vivid and moving
– Easy Living on THE BEAUTIFUL INDIFFERENCE
Invigorating... This deeply sensual novel is what you rarely find – an intelligent page-turner which, perversely, you also
want to read slowly to savour Hall’s luscious way of looking at the world
– Sunday Telegraph on HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN
Rachel Caine is the premier British expert in wolf biology and behaviour. She lives and works on
the Nez Perce Reservation in the wilds of Idaho. For months the Earl of Annerdale, one of the
richest men in the UK and owner of a vast estate in Rachel’s home county, Cumbria, has been
pursuing her in relation to his latest venture. Rachel takes a week’s leave from Chief Joseph and
travels to the remote western valleys of the Lake District to hear his proposal. The Earl of
Annerdale is wealthy and eccentric. A leading campaigner in environmental schemes, he’s
determined to bring about the most dramatic change to the countryside – the reintroduction of the
Grey Wolf, once Britain’s most successful and feared predator. Circumstances conspire to bring
Rachel home, where she begins work on the most challenging projects of her life: motherhood,
reconciliation with her estranged family, and restoring an animal that hasn’t roamed the island for
five hundred years.
Set against a background of political tumult – Scottish independence, land reform, and power
struggles – THE WOLF BORDER investigates the fundamental nature of wilderness and wildness,
both animal and human. It explores our concepts of ecology and evolution, the challenges faced by
modern rural landscapes. The novel seeks to understand the most obsessive aspects of humanity:
sex, love, and conflict; the desire to find answers to the question of our existence; those complex
systems that govern the most superior creature on earth.
Sarah Hall is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, and a collection of short stories, all
published by Faber & Faber. HAWESWATER won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best
First Novel and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award. THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO (2004)
was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Prix Femina and longlisted for the Orange Prize for
Fiction. THE CARHULLAN ARMY (2007) won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and was
shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her most recent novel is HOW TO PAINT A DEAD MAN
(2009), which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2010.
She was recently given the 2014 E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, and chosen by Granta Magazine as one of 2013’s Best Young British Novelists. A collection
of short stories, THE BEAUTIFUL INDIFFERENCE (2011), won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2012 and
the Edge Hill short story prize, it was also short-listed for the Frank O'Connor Prize. ‘Mrs. Fox’, one
in a new collection, won the 2013 BCC National Short Story Prize. She has judged a number of
prestigious literary awards and prizes. She currently lives in Norwich, Norfolk, with her partner
who is a doctor. http://www.sarahhallauthor.com/
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Faber & Faber
HarperCollins
Spring 2015
Unedited manuscript
80,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
13
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE A TO Z OF YOU AND ME
James Hannah
Ivo, our narrator, resides in St Leonard’s hospice. Once a young man
living a carefree life, he is now middle-aged with a failing body and a
head full of regrets.
Ivo’s dedicated nurse Sheila suggests a game, the ‘A to Z’, to occupy
and encourage him. Eager for distraction, Ivo begins listing his body
parts alphabetically, associating a memory with each. The results are a
kaleidoscopic chain of recollections, which together unravel the story of
Ivo’s life; of the girl who tried to help him, and the friend who wouldn’t
let her.
Told with great warmth, intimacy and dark humour, this is a compelling
novel about friendship and forgiveness, and ultimately about offering
hope to others.
James Hannah, 38, divides his time between London and Shropshire. He has a Master’s degree in
Beckett Studies from the Beckett International Foundation at Reading University, and has had short
stories published in Panurge New Writing, Stand magazine, and ROADS AHEAD, a collection edited
by Catherine O’Flynn and published by Tindal Street Press. He was a student on the Curtis Brown
Creative novel writing course in Autumn 2011. http://www.jameshannah.com/
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Transworld
Spring 2015
Unedited manuscript
65,000 words approximately
SMA
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Brazil (Rocco), Germany (Eichborn), Turkey (under offer)
14
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
TIGERMAN
Nick Harkaway
A joyful display of reckless, delightful invention... pure, unhinged delight. What a
splendid ride
– Patrick Ness, Guardian on ANGELMAKER
A puzzle box of a novel as fascinating as the clockwork bees it contains, filled with
intrigue, espionage and creative use of trains
– Erin Morgenstern, author of THE NIGHT CIRCUS on ANGELMAKER
ANGELMAKER is a magnificent, literary, post-pulp triumph... an entertaining tourde-force that demands to be adored
– David Barnett, Independent on ANGELMAKER
Lester Ferris, sergeant of the British Army, is a good man in need of a
rest. He’s spent a lot of his life being shot at, and Afghanistan was
the last stop on his road to exhaustion. He has no family, he’s nearly
forty, burned out and about to be retired.
The island of Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester to serve out his time. It’s a former British colony
in legal limbo, soon to be destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution – a
down-at-heel, mildly larcenous backwater. Of course, that also makes Mancreu perfect for shady
business, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: listening stations, offshore hospitals,
money laundering operations, drug factories and deniable torture centres. None of which should
be a problem, because Lester’s brief is to sit tight and turn a blind eye.
But Lester Ferris has made a friend: a brilliant, internet-addled street kid with a comic book
fixation who will need a home when the island dies – who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted
son. Now, as Mancreu’s small society tumbles into violence, the boy needs Lester to be more than
just an observer.
In the name of paternal love, Lester Ferris will do almost anything. And he’s a soldier with a knack
for bad places: “almost anything” could be a very great deal – even becoming some sort of hero.
But this is Mancreu, and everything here is upside down. Just exactly what sort of hero will the boy
need?
Nick Harkaway is the author of two novels (THE GONE-AWAY WORLD and ANGELMAKER, both
published by William Heinemann) and a non-fiction book about technology and how it affects us
(THE BLIND GIANT, John Murray). He won the Oxfam Emerging Writer prize at the Hay Festival in
2012 for ANGELMAKER and THE BLIND GIANT, and ANGELMAKER was recently awarded the
Red Tentacle at the Kitschies; it was also shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the LA
Times Book Prize. He is a skier, a geek, a father and a husband, a failed martial artist (across a
wide range of pugilistic disciplines), and wants to be like a cross between Stewart Brand and
Jorge Luis Borges when he grows up. He is mildly noted for sartorial bravery and for his
outrageous eyebrows. http://www.nickharkaway.com/ @Harkaway
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
William Heinemann/Random House
May 2014
Bound proofs
372 pages
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Germany (Knaus)
15
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE AMBER FURY
Natalie Haynes
A handsomely structured psychological mystery, and a moving exploration of
grief
– Lionel Shriver, author of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
A gripping first novel... impossible to put down
– Herman Koch, author of THE DINNER
A gripping thriller, but also a beautifully drawn portrait of grief and how we find
our way back to life
– Madeleine Miller, author of THE SONG OF ACHILLESf
Gripping and elegiac, funny and achingly sad, Haynes’ tale pulls you along like a
river to the falls. Hypnotic... A gripping mix of classical tragedy and warm hapless
humanism. Intense, witty and dangerously romantic, THE AMBER FURY will not be
denied... I just loved it
– Josh Whedon, film director and producer
When you open up, who will you let in?
When Alex Morris loses her fiancé in dreadful circumstances, she moves from London to Edinburgh
to make a break with the past. Alex takes a job at a Pupil Referral Unit, which accepts the students
excluded from other schools in the city. These are troubled, difficult kids and Alex is terrified of
what she’s taken on.
There is one class – a group of five teenagers – who intimidate Alex and every other teacher on
The Unit. But with the help of the Greek tragedies she teaches, Alex gradually develops a rapport
with them. Finding them enthralled by tales of cruel fate and bloody revenge, Alex even begins to
worry that they are taking her lessons to heart, and that a whole new tragedy is being performed,
right in front of her.
THE AMBER FURY is a beautifully constructed psychological page turner. It is a dark mystery of a
novel about loss, obsession and the deep and abiding human need to connect.
Natalie Haynes is a classicist and writer. She is a regular panellist on the BBC 2’s Review Show,
covering books, television, art and film for the programme; she also reviews for both Front Row
and Saturday Review on BBC Radio 4. She has written and presented documentaries for television
and radio, on subjects as diverse as the link between Greek Tragedy and soap opera, and the
respective merits of vampires versus zombies. Natalie writes a weekly column for the Independent,
and she appears as a regular panellist in the Radio 4 word quiz, Wordaholics. Her non-fiction
book, THE ANCIENT GUIDE TO MODERN LIFE, was published by Profile in 2010. She judged the
final Orange Prize, in 2012, as well as the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
http://www.nataliehaynes.com/
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Corvus/Atlantic Books
St. Martin’s Press
6 March 2014
320 pages
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Italy (Bompiani), Netherlands (Prometheus), Spain (Siruela),
Taiwan (Ten Points Publishing), Turkey (Pegasus)
16
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE DEVIL IN THE MARSHALSEA
Antonia Hodgson
Historical fiction just doesn’t get any better than this. THE DEVIL IN THE
MARSHALSEA offers up a riveting, fast-paced story, a richness of tone and a
depth of detail that would put most academics to shame. And good Tom Hawkins
is one of the best protagonists to come along in years. Magnificent!
– Jeffery Deaver, author of THE BONE COLLECTOR
This is a wonderfully entertaining novel, twisty and claustrophobic as an
underground maze. The real-life nightmare of the Marshalsea is the perfect setting
for Hodgson’s tale of skulduggery, betrayal and murder
– Maria McCann, author of THE WILDING
Hodgson’s utterly compelling debut is fiendishly plotted and dripping with
atmosphere. I cannot wait for Tom Hawkins’ next adventure
– Mark Billingham, author of the ‘Tom Thorne’ series
It is the mesh of lies and duplicity that draws you into this brilliant first novel... We
follow Tom on a blood-drenched investigation that twists and turns in the vortex
of Georgian society
– Ben Wilson, The Times
THE DEVIL IN THE MARSHALSEA really is something new in the world of historical fiction. Such is the detail and
atmosphere of Hodgson’s writing that at times she even rivals Dickens. Lovers of historical crime need to keep a
weather eye on Ms Hodgson
– Barry Forshaw, Daily Express
London, 1727 – Tom Hawkins is about to fall from his heaven of card games, brothels and coffeehouses to the hell of a debtors’ prison.
The Marshalsea is a savage world of its own, with simple rules: those with family or friends who
can lend them a little money may survive in relative comfort. Those with none will starve in squalor
and disease.
Tom finds the recent grisly murder of a debtor, Captain Roberts, has brought further terror to the
gaol. And while the Captain’s beautiful widow cries for justice, the finger of suspicion points only
one way: to the sly, enigmatic figure of Samuel Fleet.
Some call Fleet the devil, a man to avoid at all costs.
But Tom Hawkins is sharing his cell.
Soon, Tom’s choice is clear: get to the truth of the murder – or be the next to die.
Antonia Hodgson was born in Derby and studied English at the University of Leeds. She has
worked in publishing for over fifteen years and is Editor-in-Chief at Little, Brown UK. When she is
not writing or working or watching Game of Thrones, she enjoys reading eighteenth-century murder
confessions in the British Library. @AntoniaHodgson
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Hodder & Stoughton
27 March 2014
384 pages
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (HMH), France (XO Editions), Germany (Droemer Knaur),
Greece (Livanis), Italy (Newton Compton), Poland (Amber)
17
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
UNTITLED
Antonia Hodgson
Spring 1728. A young, well-dressed man is dragged through
the streets of London to the gallows at Tyburn. The crowds jeer
and curse as he passes, calling him a murderer. He tries to
remain calm. His name is Tom Hawkins and he is innocent.
Somehow he has to prove it, before the rope squeezes the life
out of him.
It is, of course, all his own fault. He was happy with Kitty
Sparks. Life was good. He should never have told the most
dangerous criminal in London that he was ‘bored and looking
for adventure’. He should never have offered to help Henrietta
Howard, the king’s mistress, in her desperate struggles with a
brutal husband. And most of all, he should never have trusted
the witty, calculating Queen Caroline. She has promised him a
royal pardon if he holds his tongue but then again, there is
nothing more silent than a hanged man.
Based loosely on actual events, Antonia Hodgson’s new novel is both a sequel to THE DEVIL IN THE
MARSHALSEA and a standalone historical mystery. From the gilded cage of the Court to the
wicked freedoms of the slums, it reveals a world both seductive and deadly. And it continues the
rake’s progress of Tom Hawkins – assuming he can find a way to survive the noose...
Antonia Hodgson was born in Derby and studied English at the University of Leeds. She has
worked in publishing for over fifteen years and is Editor-in-Chief at Little, Brown UK. When she is
not writing or working or watching Game of Thrones, she enjoys reading eighteenth-century murder
confessions in the British Library.
UK Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Hodder & Stoughton
May 2014
Spring 2015
100,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, France (XO Editions), Germany (Droemer Knaur)
18
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
SWEET DAMAGE
Rebecca James
[An] exquisitely creepy debut... James captures the bitchy dialogue and
obsessive nature of teen friendships in an uncomfortably real and utterly
gripping manner. You’ll shiver on the warmest of beaches
– Alexandra Heminsley, Independent on Sunday on BEAUTIFUL MALICE
The entire book is entertaining and eminently readable... characters to invest in
and an interesting plot with several stings in the tail
– Sandra Kasturi, Globe and Mail on BEAUTIFUL MALICE
The success of James’ book arises from its sophisticated presentation of
cataclysmic themes, as well as its satisfying conclusion that is uplifting yet, in
accordance with the rest of the narrative, more bitter than sweet
– Maya Linden, Australian Book Review on BEAUTIFUL MALICE
‘I still dream about Anna London’s house. In my dreams it’s as if the
house itself has sinister intentions. But in real life it wasn't the house
that was responsible for what happened. It was the people who did
the damage...’
When Tim Ellison finds a cheap room to rent in the perfect location in Sydney it looks like a stroke
of luck. But the room comes with a condition – Tim must run errands for the reclusive owner,
beautiful Anna London.
When terrifying things start happening in the house, Tim is forced to think about leaving. But he’s
fallen for Anna, and when her past comes back with a vengeance Tim is caught right in the middle
A thrilling, rollercoaster of a story for the teen market – read it with the lights on!
Rebecca James was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1970. Amongst other things, she has worked
variously as a waitress, an ESL teacher and a kitchen designer. She spent much of her twenties
teaching English in Indonesia and Japan, and now lives in Australia with her partner and their four
sons. Her first novel, BEAUTIFUL MALICE, was published by Faber & Faber in July 2010 and in over
30 languages worldwide. http://rebeccajameslollygag.blogspot.co.uk/
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Australian Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Faber & Faber
Bantam Dell/Random House
Allen & Unwin
6 March 2014
362 pages
SMA
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Australia, Brazil (Intrinseca), China (Shanghai Translation
Publishing), Czech Republic (Euromedia), Denmark (Gyldendal), France (OH! Editions), Greece (Psichiogos), Indonesia
(Mahda Books), Israel (Modan), Italy (Einaudi), Japan (Hayakawa), Lithuania (Alma Littera), Netherlands (Mouria),
Norway (Gyldendal), Poland (Amber), Portugal (Objectiva), Romania (Trei), Russia (AST), Slovakia (Ikar), Spain (Grup
62), Sweden (Alfabeta), Turkey (Artemis), Vietnam (Tre)
19
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE LOVE SONG OF
MISS QUEENIE HENNESSY
Rachel Joyce
A tender second novel by the author of THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD
FRY... the power of Joyce’s prose lies in small, astute observations... these subtle
touches give the book an intense, slightly mesmeric feel... Tense and engrossing,
readers who loved THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY will not be
disappointed
– The Sunday Times on PERFECT
Diana herself is faultless. She is to PERFECT what Harold Fry was to [THE UNLIKELY
PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY]: a fully rounded hero, someone to fall in love with
and argue about, cherish and admonish, as though she were real... If only there
were more novelists like Rachel Joyce
– Telegraph on PERFECT
What’s wrong with it? Nothing. It’s brilliant... Uplifting, engaging, sad and funny. A
perfect follow-up to THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY
– Heat on PERFECT
When Queenie Hennessy discovers that Harold Fry is walking the length of England to save her
from cancer and that all she has to do is wait, she is shocked. How can she keep living? How can
she wait?
A new volunteer at the hospice suggests that Queenie should write a second letter to Harold Fry;
only this time she must tell the truth. The letter, the volunteer promises, will enable Queenie to keep
waiting. It will also atone for the secrets of the past.
What emerges from the pages is the woman about whom we knew nothing. The woman about
whom Harold knew nothing. Queenie is not just a plain woman in a brown suit who likes sweets and
can sing backwards. She is a classics student, a dancer, the creator of a sea garden and she is also
a woman with a habit of running away.
Life in the hospice may be reduced to the changing light at a window, to conversations in the
recreation room and songs of the past, but as Harold’s journey gathers momentum, so does
Queenie Hennessy’s. The hospice where she came to die thrums with life.
Queenie thought her first letter would be the end of the story. She was wrong. It was just the
beginning.
Rachel Joyce is the author of The Sunday Times bestsellers THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF
HAROLD FRY, which was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and longlisted for the 2012 Man
Booker Prize, and for which Rachel Joyce was awarded the Specsaver National Book Award for
New Writer of the Year 2013, and PERFECT. Her books have been translated into 32 langauges.
She has written over twenty original afternoon plays for BBC Radio 4, and major adaptations for
the classic Serial and Woman’s Hour, as well as a TV period drama for BBC 2. In 2007 she won
the Tinniswood Award for Best Radio Play. She lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and four
children. http://www.rachel-joyce.co.uk/
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Doubleday/Transworld
Susan Kamil Books/Random House
October 2014
35,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Canada (Doubleday), Germany (Kreuger/Scherz)
20
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
MAN ON FIRE
Stephen Kelman
Simultaneously accurate and fantastical, this boy’s love letter to the world made
me laugh and tremble all the way through. PIGEON ENGLISH is a triumph
– Emma Donoghue, author of ROOM, on PIGEON ENGLISH
PIGEON ENGLISH is a book to fall in love with: a funny book, a true book, a
shattering book
– Erica Wagner, The Times, on PIGEON ENGLISH
Stephen Kelman’s [first novel] has a powerful story, a pacy plot and engaging
characters. It paints a vivid portrait with honesty, sympathy and wit, of a much
neglected milieu, and it addresses urgent social questions. It is horrifying, tender
and funny... Brilliant
– Daily Telegraph on PIGEON ENGLISH
John is an Englishman in crisis. The cancer he’d thought he’d beaten has returned. In an attempt to
reclaim what is left of his life, John travels to Mumbai to take his last shot at greatness. He is
searching for Bibhuti, an amateur record breaker whose story he has stumbled upon by chance,
and who specialises in feats of extreme endurance and ill-advised masochism. Bibhuti’s next record
attempt – to have fifty baseball bats broken over his body – will set the seal on a career that has
seen him rise from poverty to become a minor celebrity in a nation where to stand out from the
crowd requires guts, invention and a touch of madness.
Inspired by Bibhuti’s singular pursuit of a life less ordinary, John petitions to be his partner in the
attempt. With no other source of funding, and no one else willing to risk his blood on their hands,
Bibhuti agrees. The leap of faith they now take together binds them in a friendship that defies
reason and reveals to John a spiritual world he has never previously believed in. But is it obsession,
exploitation or something deeper that drives them on towards a final act of reckoning? And will
either man survive to bear the changes they have burned into each other on their walk through the
fire?
MAN ON FIRE is a study of human dignity and male folly; a story of transformation, loss and
rebirth. With its thrilling combination of audacity and heart, MAN ON FIRE confirms Stephen
Kelman as a unique literary voice.
Stephen Kelman is 37. His first novel, PIGEON ENGLISH, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
in 2011, as well as the Guardian First Book Award, a Galaxy National Book Award, and seven
other prizes. The novel sold in 28 territories.
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury Publishing
April 2015
Unedited manuscript
95,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Germany (Berlin Verlag)
21
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE ROCKS
Peter Nichols
Nichols’ account of his madcap voyage is intimate and introspective, but
sparing enough in detail to remain dignified
– Observer on SEA CHANGE
Nichols writes of the sea and ships with great feeling and accuracy. With his
lean but telling style, he is as convincing on seafaring, navigation and
weather as Hemingway is on big game hunting or bullfighting.... Nichols
shows an amazingly practiced hand for a fledgling novelist... this is an utterly
gripping read
– Observer on VOYAGE TO THE NORTH STAR
As a carpenter purrs over perfect dovetailing, so I rejoiced in the
craftsmanship of this book
– Simon Barnes on A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN
On a spring afternoon in 2005, Gerald and Lulu, both English and in their eighties, meet on a
rocky coastal road in Mallorca for the first time in nearly half a century. They were married for
only a few weeks in 1948, and though both have lived in the same small village in Mallorca ever
since, they’ve managed to avoid each other almost completely. On this day however, a break in
routine brings them together. They quarrel fiercely, stumble into the sea, and drown.
This is the beginning of Peter Nichols’s darkly comic, deeply human novel, THE ROCKS. The story
then moves backwards in time, unravelling layers of romance and bitter feuds across three
generations, until it arrives at the catastrophic event that destroys Gerald and Lulu’s brief
marriage.
With a cast of louche and vivid characters set against a seductive Mediterranean backdrop, this
novel is a feat of bravura storytelling reminiscent of ONE DAY and CAPTAIN CORELLI’S
MANDOLIN. THE ROCKS is a romantic, bleakly funny, heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting novel.
Peter Nichols is the author of a novel, VOYAGE TO THE NORTH STAR, which was a Book Of The
Month Club Main Selection and nominated for the Dublin IMPAC literary award the international,
as well as the bestsellers A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN (finalist for the William Hill Sports Book of the
Year), EVOLUTION’S CAPTAIN, and three other books of fiction, memoir, and non-fiction, which
have been translated into many languages. His nonfiction has been nominated for an American
Pushcart Prize. His novel THE ROCKS will be published by Heron Books/Quercus in 2014. He has
taught creative writing at Georgetown University, NYU in Paris, Bowdoin College, and elsewhere.
Before turning to writing full time Peter spent ten years at sea working as a professional yacht
captain, during which time he sailed alone in a small leaky boat across the Atlantic, the subject of
his first book, SEA CHANGE. He has also worked as a screenwriter.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Heron/Quercus
Riverhead/Penguin
Spring 2015
Unedited manuscript
120,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, France (Robert Laffont), Korea (Random House Korea)
22
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
SQUARE EYES
Anna Mill, Luke Jones and Chris Day
Shortlisted for the Jonathan Cape/Observer Graphic
Fiction Prize 2010
Mill’s gorgeous illustrations are like an update of Arthur
Rackham: her entry includes one frame – crammed full of
birds on the wing – that is so beautiful, it is a work of art
in itself
– Rachel Cook, Observer
Imagine a world in the not-too-distant future, in
which the internet has left our screens and
inhabits the world around us, overlaid as an
extra layer of what we see.
Fin is just out of rehab, having gone cold turkey
on technology for six months. George,
meanwhile is still plugging away at his job
fixing holograms.
Together, the two friends begin to realise that, underneath the gaudy spectacle of the projections,
buildings, tube stops – even whole streets – are going missing.
Each page of augmented appearances and adverts is an artwork in itself, but as more places
disappear, it becomes increasingly important not to believe what you are seeing...
Anna Mill studied Architecture at UCL and has worked in practice in London and Mumbai. Her solo
work has been exhibited at Gordon Square and a collaborative project was shown at the Blyth
Gallery and went on to be curator’s choice at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2010.
http://annamill.com/
Luke Jones studied Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
He won the Donalson Medal and Faculty of the Built Environment Medal for his degree project, an
underground station in Venice. His published work includes a chapter in the ten year retrospective
Bartlett Designs (London: John Wiley 2009), and the essay ‘A spectral turn around Venice’
Opticon1826 Issue No. 5 (Autumn 2008). He returns frequently to critique students’ work, and to
teach at the Bartlett Summer School.
Chris Day studied Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sheffield, winning the Peter H.
Nidditch Prize for Philosophy. In the last few years he has worked for intelligent free newspaper
Notes From The Underground and video game company Square Enix.
UK Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Jonathan Cape
January 2015
Autumn 2015
Proposal
280 pages
APC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Finland (Like), France (Delcourt), Germany (Arche/Atrium), Sweden
(Epix)
World English langauge rights: Jonathan Cape
23
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
RESERVOIR OAPS
John Niven
STRAIGHT WHITE MALE is a heartbreaker; a poignant literary treatise on the all-toomortal battle between human individual desire and social need, disguised as a highoctane novel of laddish excess
– Irvine Welsh, author of TRAINSPOTTING on STRAIGHT WHITE MALE
We can’t help rooting for Kennedy, a seducer but never a misogynist; a charmer who
rushes at life with zest and brio. STRAIGHT WHITE MALE is a sharp and knowing satire
of the film industry, publishing and academia... Thoroughly enjoyable
– Suzy Feay, Guardian on STRAIGHT WHITE MALE
It takes confidence to write a book critiquing books and writers, with a central
character who’s abundantly free with his views, but Niven shouldn’t be underestimated.
The tone here is authentic. Funny and angry, for sure, yet also thoughtful and
humane. STRAIGHT WHITE MALE is strong indeed
– The Times on STRAIGHT WHITE MALE
There’s nothing faster, sadder or funnier than John Niven on men. I cried three times and laughed fifty. Magnificent
– Caitlin Moran, author of HOW TO BE A WOMAN on STRAIGHT WHITE MALE
Helen Frobisher and Julie Wickham are just turning 60. They live in a small Dorset town and have
been friends since school. Helen has been a housewife all her life, married to nice but boring Barry,
while Julie has travelled the world, living recklessly, and now has several failed businesses and
bad marriages behind her.
Then Helen’s world is ripped apart when Barry is found dead. In a secret flat Helen didn’t know
they owned, where he had been leading a fantastical double life as a swinger. He’s run up a
fortune in debts – in both their names. The bank is going to take Helen’s house and she’ll lose
everything she’s never worked for.
Caught in an impossible bind, what do the two friends decide to do? The only thing that seems
sensible in their situation: rob the bank.
RESERVIOR OAPS is a sharp satire on friendship, ageing, the English middle-classes, and two
daring women who discover that, far from winding down, their lives are only just beginning.
John Niven spent a number of years working as an A&R manager. His first book, MUSIC FROM
BIG PINK, a fictional novella set in the world around Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock in the
1960s, was critically acclaimed on publication in 2007. Film rights to the book were acquired by
Stephen Butterworth. John is also the author of KILL YOUR FRIENDS (his cult satire on the music
industry, which was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Award, and which has just gone into
production as a film), THE AMATEURS and THE SECOND COMING, all of which were published by
William Heinemann to critical acclaim and universal press coverage. @NivenJ1
UK Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
William Heinemann/Random House
May 2014
September 2014
80-90,000 words
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Germany (Heyne Hardcore)
24
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
BREAKFAST WITH THE BORGIAS
DBC Pierre
DBC Pierre’s first book, VERNON GOD LITTLE, was brilliant. LIGHTS OUT is even
better... Pierre proves that a book can be insightful and shocking as well as
melancholic and wickedly funny. Only someone able to take the piss out of
themselves and the world they live in so astutely could pull this off: irresistible
– Time Out, Book of the Week on LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND
If any novelist can collate the killing irony of what is happening around us it is DBC
Pierre... As with the dextrous ventriloquism in VERNON GOD LITTLE, Gabriel’s
living and very beautiful voice carries this convulsive novel... This swollen, bruising
novel needs to be defended as an artful shout of protest from a soul on fire
– Alan Warner, Guardian on LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND
Pierre’s writing is heady, reaching glorious heights of linguistic invention. He shows
that he is just as adept at conjuring a sense of place – this time in Japan and
Germany – as he was in his pitch perfect presentation of the Texan vernacular in his
Booker-prize winning debut, VERNON GOD LITTLE
– Independent on LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND
Part of the Hammer Supernatural Anniversary Series
The setting: a faded, lonely guesthouse on the Suffolk coast. Outside, it’s dark and very foggy.
Inside there’s no phone of internet reception, no hope of connectivity with the outside world.
Enter Ariel Panek, a promising young academic en route from the USA to a convention in
Amsterdam. With his plane grounded at Stansted, he has been booked in for the night at the
guesthouse.
Discombobulated and jetlagged, he falls in with a family who appear to be commemorating an
event.
But this is no ordinary commemoration. And this is no ordinary family.
As evening becomes night, Panek realises that he has become caught in an insidious web of other
people’s secrets and lies, a Sartrian hell from which there may for him be no escape…
DBC Pierre has worked as a designer and cartoonist, and currently divides his time between the
UK and Ireland. His first novel, VERNON GOD LITTLE, won the 2003 Bollinger Everyman
Woodhouse Award, the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, and the 2003 Man Booker
Prize. It is published in 43 countries. Pierre’s second novel, LUDMILA’S BROKEN ENGLISH, was
published by Faber in 2006, and his third, LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND, in September 2010.
His new book PETIT MAL was published by Faber in September 2013. http://www.dbcpierre.com/
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Hammer/Random House
July 2014
Unedited manuscript
40,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
25
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
PEACE AND CONFLICT
Irene Sabatini
Winner of the 2010 Orange Award for New Writers
This is an exuberant, tender and often humorous love story... Irene Sabatini is a
born writer, and she has told a completely engrossing story which combines
brilliantly realised fictional characters as well as evoking the only too real sad
degradation of a once-thriving country
– Daily Mail on THE BOY NEXT DOOR
[THE BOY NEXT DOOR is] one of the most engaging novels about inter-racial
love to be published this century... Sabatini shows the gradual collapse of her
‘country of eternal optimists’ with a hundred swift, sure touches and a rich cast of
characters, heightening tension and mystery... It is entertaining, ambitious and
packed with news from elsewhere, leavened by the precious optimism of youth.
Don’t miss it
– Independent on THE BOY NEXT DOOR
Robert knows many things. He knows all about the city, with its statues and cannons and the Longest
Bench in the World. He knows about all the places his dad has been, because he always brings
back presents. He knows that his mum is trying to write a book about vampires and how long his
brother spends practicing his swag poses. He knows all about animals, too, because his Auntie
Delphia is a vet in Zimbabwe.
But still he has questions. Why is his neighbour, Monsieur Renoir, so evil? Why did he leave a
Victoria Cross medal on Robert’s doorstep? What’s that smell outside his door? And why has Auntie
Delphia disappeared?
Questions, questions, questions.
Robert recently took the Peace and Conflict unit in school, and he learned all about wars and
heroes. But as the lives of Robert’s friends, foes and family unfold, he discovers that you can’t just
spot a hero by their medal...
Irene Sabatini was born and grew up in Zimbabwe. After completing a degree at the University of
Harare, she left the country, and lived in Colombia, the Caribbean and London. She has now
settled down with her husband and two sons in Geneva, Switzerland. Irene’s first novel, THE BOY
NEXT DOOR, was published by Sceptre in April 2010, and won the Orange Award for New
Writers that year. PEACE AND CONFLICT is her second novel, with great crossover potential, and
she is currently working on a sequel. http://www.irenesabatini.com/ @isabatini
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Much-in-Little/Constable & Robinson
November 2014
Edited manuscript
78,000 words
APC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth (excl. Canada)
26
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE KINDNESS
Polly Samson
Accomplished... Focusing, sometimes comically, sometimes compassionately,
on apparently prospering, well-organised and contented people, Samson
traces tremors of disruption threatening the stability of her characters'
relationships and themselves
– Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times on PERFECT LIVES
Terrific. Funny, beautifully observed and often poignant, they're the best thing
Samson has produced yet... This is a writer who misses nothing
– Cressida Connolly, Spectator on PERFECT LIVES
Subtle and complex... PERFECT LIVES is an echo chamber of cause and effect,
and art and life, and life and loss
– Carole Cadwalladr, Observer on PERFECT LIVES
Julian’s fall begins the moment he sets eyes on Julia, a woman eight years older than him with an
unconventional past. He heeds no warnings, not from his friends nor from the pages he is studying
of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. The loss of his family home and academic future seems a small price to
pay for rapture, particularly when Julia gives birth to their daughter. Julia, however, is keeping a
secret.
With lyrical prose and masterful plotting Polly Samson explores the tragic consequences of Julia’s
secret from both sides. As Julian and Julia’s versions twist and unravel it becomes clear that neither
is quite what they seem to the other, that their love is no simple affair and that even the kindest of
lies can devastate a family.
Polly Samson was born in London in 1962. She is the author of two highly acclaimed story
collections and a novel and has written lyrics for two number one albums. Her novel, OUT OF THE
PICTURE, was shortlisted for the Author Club’s First Novel Award and her most recent linked story
collection, PERFECT LIVES, was a Sunday Times Fiction Choice of the Year and read on BBC Radio
4. Polly has worked in publishing and as a journalist and columnist and as a lyricist for Pink Floyd’s
‘The Division Bell’ and David Gilmour’s ‘On An Island’. She recently wrote the introduction to
Daphne du Maurier’s THE DOLL AND OTHER STORIES and was a Costa Prize judge in 2004.
www.pollysamson.com @PollySamson
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury
April 2015
Unedited manuscript
90,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Bloomsbury), Canada (Penguin)
World English language rights: Bloomsbury
27
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE VISITORS
Simon Sylvester
Nobody moves to the remote Scottish island of Bancree, and few leave
– but leaving is exactly what seventeen year old Flo intends to do. So
when a mysterious man and his daughter move into isolated Dog
Cottage, Flo is curious. Who would willingly choose to live in such
solitude? The man’s brooding handsomeness is extraordinary; and
there’s something unusual about his daughter Selina that Flo cannot
help but be drawn towards.
But people aren’t only arriving on Bancree, they are disappearing too.
Reports of missing islanders fill the press, and when a body washes
ashore, suspicion turns to the strange new outsiders.
Convinced of their innocence, Flo is fiercely determined to protect her
friend. Could the answer to the disappearances, and to the
overwhelming pull of her own heart, lie out there, beyond the waves?
Simon Sylvester is a writer, teacher and occasional filmmaker. He was born in 1980 and raised in
Scotland, England, Germany and Northern Ireland. After working as a camera assistant and
journalist, he started writing fiction. His short stories are published regularly in literary journals, and
he is now working on his second novel. Simon lives in Cumbria with the painter Monica Metsers and
their daughter Isadora. http://simonsylvester.wordpress.com/ @simonasylvester
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Quercus
June 2014
Bound proofs
362 pages
SMA
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
28
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
ANIMALS
Emma Jane Unsworth
I wish I had written this book. ‘Withnail & I’ with girls: boozy adrenaline glee
– Caitlin Moran, author of HOW TO BE A WOMAN
A devilish tale spun in angelic prose. Like all the best novels
– John Niven, author of KILL YOUR FRIENDS and THE SECOND COMING
Savagely funny, clever and wise. If it’s not an instant cult classic I’m leaving the cult
– Nathan Filer, author of THE SHOCK OF THE FALL
You know how it is. Saturday afternoon. You wake up and you can’t move. I
blinked and the floaters on my eyeballs shifted to reveal Tyler in her ratty
old kimono over in the doorway. ‘Way I see it,’ she said, glass in one hand,
lit cigarette in the other, ‘girls are tied to beds for two reasons: sex and
exorcisms. So, which was it with you?’
Laura and Tyler best friends who live together, angrily philosophizing and leading each other
astray in the pubs and flats of Manchester. But things are set to change. Laura is engaged to
teetotal Jim, the wedding is just months away, and Tyler becomes hell-bent on sabotaging her
friend’s plans for a different life.
ANIMALS is a hilarious, moving and refreshingly honest tale of how a friendship can become the
ultimate loves story.
Emma Jane Unsworth’s debut novel, HUNGRY THE STARS AND EVERYTHING, won a Betty Trask
Award from the Society of Authors and was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Fiction 2012. Her
short stories have been published by Comma and Prospect, and her story ‘I Arrive First’ was
included in THE BEST BRITISH SHORT STORIES 2012 (Salt). She is a columnist for The Big Issue in the
North and tweets at @emjaneunsworth. http://emmajaneunsworth.com/
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Canongate
May 2014
Proofs
256 pages
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Canada (HarperCollins), Germany (Metrolit)
World English language rights: Canongate
29
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
SECOND LIFE
S J Watson
Author of the international bestseller BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP: winner of
the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award 2011, and Dutch Crimezone
Best Debut of the Year Award 2011
Quite simply the best debut novel I’ve ever read
– Tess Gerritsen on BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP
Brilliant in its pacing, profound in its central question, suspenseful on every
page – and satisfying in its thriller ending
– Anita Shreve on BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP
One of the most fêted authors of the year. His novel is dripping in
endorsements... It is a novel that tackles the big themes – life, love, loss – but
it is also a superior literary page-turner
– The Sunday Times on BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP
A truly amazing debut. The central character, Christine, is beautifully drawn.
It’s hard to imagine a more compelling, believable and sympathetic portrayal
of a damaged human being. I loved it from start to finish
– Mo Hayder on BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP
Julia’s life is comfortable, if unremarkable, until the brutal murder of her sister opens old wounds.
She finds solace in her sister’s best friend, Verity, but when Verity tells her about her sister’s online
habits Julia begins an obsessive search for the truth about her sister’s death which leads her deep
into the world of online chatrooms and internet sex.
What begins as a search for the truth about her sister quickly turns into an exploration of herself
and her own desires. After all, the internet is her playground, and why be just one thing when you
can be as many as you like? What could possibly go wrong? After all, it’s only cybersex, isn’t it? No
one’s going to get hurt.
But then she meets the dark and mysterious Lukas in an online chat room, and things begin to get
very dangerous indeed.
Prior to writing, S J Watson worked in the National Health Service for a number of years. He was
one of the first pupils on the Faber Academy creative writing course. Dubbed by The New York
Times as “an out of nowhere literary sensation”, his first novel, BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, has so far
sold in 43 territories and has achieved worldwide critical acclaim as well as bestseller status in
most of them. http://www.sjwatson-books.com/ @SJ_Watson
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Australian Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Agent
Doubleday/Transworld
HarperCollins
Text Publishing
June 2014
TBC
Partial manuscript
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US and Canada, Australia, Brazil (Record), China (Citic), Finland
(Bazar), France (Sonatine), Germany (S. Fischer), Greece (Psichiogos), Israel (Keter Books), Italy (Piemme), Korea
(Random House Korea), Netherlands (Ambo|Anthos), Norway (Bazar), Poland (Sonia Draga), Russia (AST), Spain
(Random House Mondadori), Spain/Catalan (Grijalbo), Sweden (Bazar), Taiwan (Solo Press), Vietnam (Tre)
30
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE SPIDER OF SARAJEVO
Robert Wilton
Literary gold... superbly satisfying... beautifully written, wonderfully clever
– Daily Telegraph on TREASON’S TIDE
A sparkling gem of a novel; not only a gripping espionage thriller that has the extra thrill of
being grounded in genuine history, but a beautiful, lyrical novel alive with the sheer joy of
language. Literate, intelligent, utterly captivating
– M C Scott, author of ROME: THE EMPEROR’S SPY on TREASON’S TIDE
Sensational, great, intelligent, fun
– Time Out on TREASON’S TIDE
A novel of shadows, intrigue and manipulation in a Europe teetering on the
brink of the Great War
Spring 1914: Europe is on the brink of war, and two master spies are at work – the ComptrollerGeneral for Scrutiny and Survey and the man with whom he wages a personal war, an agent of
manipulation known as The Spider.
Obsessed with the man he has been fighting for twenty years, the Comptroller-General sends four
young agents into Europe, where they are surrounded by the manoeuvrings of the warring spies.
But these agents are more than mere pawns in a game. They have a secret mission all of their own
– to assassinate the heir to the Austrian throne...
Robert Wilton has held a variety of posts in the British Ministry of Defence, Foreign Office and
Cabinet Office. He was advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in the lead-up to the country’s
independence, and has now returned there as a senior international official. His novels TREASON’S
TIDE and TRAITOR’S FIELD were published by Corvus in 2011 and 2013 respectively. He divides
his time between Kosovo and Cornwall. http://www.robertwilton.com
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Corvus/Atlantic Books
June 2014
Bound proofs
416 pages
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
31
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
THE HOUSEHOLD SPIRIT
Tod Wodicka
Bursting with humour and weighted with sadness
– The Financial Times on ALL SHALL BE WELL
Wodicka has crafted an eccentric tale full of humour and compassion
– Guardian on ALL SHALL BE WELL
A boisterous debut... a genuinely moving narrative – applause is justified
– Times Literary Supplement on ALL SHALL BE WELL
Vibrant, original, at times hilarious... reminiscent of Philip Roth or Jonathan
Franzen (or The Royal Tenenbaums, for that matter)
– New Statesman on ALL SHALL BE WELL
On a remote road in rural upstate New York, Howie Jeffries and Emily Phane live side by side in
adjoining houses but without having had any contact for decades. Howie has been crippled with
shyness and selfconsciousness ever since his wife and daughter left him for a confident, more
flamboyant alternative. He dreams of being needed as a father by his daughter Harri, of
companionship, and quietly squirrels away any spare money in a tin with a simple sailboat in mind.
Emily has lived alone with her elderly grandfather since a dreadful accident orphaned her and fills
her house and her life with plants. She too is crippled – by a devastating sleep paralysis which
gradually drains her and leaves her unable to form lasting and meaningful relationships or to
complete her college education.
It’s only when tragedy strikes that Howie and Emily are forced together – forced to confront their
fears, their wishes and their innate human desire for friendship. And in doing so they learn about
fishing, true love, bad art, fatherhood, grandfatherhood, psychedelic drugs, loss and what it means
to be happy.
Tod Wodicka was born in Glens Falls, NY in 1976. He graduated from the University of
Manchester, UK. He is currently lives in Berlin and Moscow. Tod’s writing has appeared in
the Guardian, Granta, the New Statesman and Tank Magazine. THE HOUSEHOLD SPIRIT is his
second novel; his first, ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL MANNER OF
THINGS SHALL BE WELL was published by Random House in 2008 to critical acclaim.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Jonathan Cape/Random House
Pantheon/Random House
Spring 2015
Edited manuscript
100,000 words approximately
SAL
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
32
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
GHOSTWRITTEN
Isabel Wolff
Wonderful, tender and compelling
– Rachel Hore, author of THE DREAM HOUSE
Beautifully written, extraordinarily moving – a story that grips from start to finish
– Lesley Downer, author of ACROSS THE BRIDGE OF DREAMS
It’s quite a while since I enjoyed a book this much. To be frank I wish I’d written it
myself. It’s very funny, charming, upbeat and unputdownable. Acutely observed and so
well written. I was completely diverted and entertained
– Marian Keyes on A VINTAGE AFFAIR
This book lives up to its hype, and is filled with all the sensory goodness that leads to
inevitable comparisons to Joanne Harris – this is an author to bookmark
– Irish Tatler on A VINTAGE AFFAIR
A childhood mistake. A life-long secret. One chance to make the right decision.
Jenni loves her job as a ghostwriter. It allows her to immerse herself in other people’s memories –
and hide from her own.
Jenni has an exciting new commission, and is delighted to start working on the memoirs of a
Dutchwoman, Klara. As a child in the Second World War, Klara was interned in a camp on Java
during the Japanese occupation – she has an extraordinary story of survival to tell.
But as Jenni and Klara begin to get to know each other, Jenni begins to do much more than shed
light on a neglected part of history. She is being forced to examine her own devastating memories,
too. But with Klara’s help, perhaps this is finally the moment where she will be able to lay the
ghosts of her own past to rest?
Gripping, poignant and beautifully researched, GHOSTWRITTEN is a story of survival and love, of
memory and hope.
Isabel Wolff is the author of nine internationally bestselling novels: THE TRIALS OF TIFFANY TROTT,
THE MAKING OF MINTY MALONE, OUT OF THE BLUE, RESCUING ROSE, BEHAVING BADLY, A
QUESTION OF LOVE, FORGET ME NOT, A VINTAGE AFFAIR and THE VERY PICTURE OF YOU,
which have sold in thirty languages worldwide. She is also a journalist and broadcaster. She lives
in London. http://www.isabelwolff.com/ @IsabelWolff
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
HarperCollins
Bantam Dell/Random House
27 March 2014
384 pages
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Canada (HarperCollins Canada), France (JC Lattes), Hungary
(Sanoma Media), Poland (Proszynski Media), Spain (Lumen)
33
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Fiction
CHOP CHOP
Simon Wroe
Demotic and inventive, peopled with technicolour characters and savagely funny,
CHOP CHOP announces Simon Wroe as both an heir to Martin Amis and an ovenfresh talent unto himself
– AD Miller, Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of SNOWDROPS
A brutally funny look at the world of professional cooking. Sometimes the truth is so
strange it needs to be sautéed in a pan of fiction
– Gary Shteyngart, author of SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY
If like me, you’ve ever made your living from restaurant work, you’ll recognize The
Swan with a comical shiver. CHOP CHOP captures the combustible mix of sadism,
gallows humor, machismo, and surprising perfectionism that powers many a
professional kitchen. And it’s all served up to us in great fun
– Scott Hutchins, author of A WORKING THEORY OF LOVE
When ‘Monocle’, our young narrator, walked into The Swan, he dreamt only of escaping his
parents and, in particular, proving his critical father wrong. But as the kitchen’s new commis, his high
hopes and soft hands were quickly demolished under Head Chef Bob’s cruel regime of abuse,
bullying and humiliation.
Despite Bob’s tyranny, Monocle develops a strange camaraderie with his co-workers, vulgar and
puerile as they are, and finally begins to settle. His life might be a mess, but it’s his life, and one,
he realises, he’s come to treasure. Then his deadbeat father turns up seeking refuge and beckoning
trouble. But the real menace comes from an unlikely source, the Fat Man, whose fondness for
blackmail and heinous appetite puts Monocle’s commitment to a dark and grisly test...
Blending the surreal with the painfully recognisable, CHOP CHOP takes the reader on a boisterous
journey that is at once funny and appalling. In this wildly original novel, value isn’t about
measuring up to others. It doesn’t matter how much or little you have in life, it’s whether you fight
for it or not.
Simon Wroe is a freelance journalist and former chef. He writes about food for Prospect
magazine, art and culture for the Economist and has contributed articles and features to a wide
range of publications including Private Eye, Intelligent Life, The Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph,
the Independent and the Evening Standard. Simon is 31 and lives in London. This is his first novel.
http://chopchopnovel.tumblr.com/ @simon_wroe
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Viking/Penguin
Penguin Press
3 April 2014
336 pages
SMA
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Germany (Ullstein), Italy (Rizzoli), Netherlands (De Arbeiderspers),
Spain (Salamandra), Spain/Catalan (Edicions 62)
World English langauge rights: Viking/Penguin
34
Conville & Walsh Ltd.
Spring 2014 Rights Guide
NON-FICTION
35
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
LIFE ON THE EDGE
The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden
This book will bring together two of the most exciting
areas in modern scientific research – quantum physics
and molecular biology. It will show how this new crossdisciplinary subject has evolved rapidly over the past
decade, from a speculative field on the fringes of
scientific respectability, to one to which many of the
world’s brightest minds are now turning their attention.
If what quantum biology is telling us about the nature of life itself is true, then it is certainly
destined to become one of the most important areas of scientific research of the twenty-first
century.
Evidence has been mounting over the past decade that a vast array of biological processes, from
photosynthesis to bird migration to what turns a cell cancerous, can only be explained properly if
the molecules of life are also governed by the mysterious rules of quantum mechanics. It might even
provide an answer to the most profound question of all: how did life itself begin?
Professor Jim Al-Khalili OBE is an academic, author and broadcaster. He is a leading theoretical
physicist based at the University of Surrey, where he holds a personal chair in physics and the
public engagement in science. He has written a number of popular science books, translated so far
into thirteen languages, with his most recent being PARADOX: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics
(Transworld, 2012). He has presented a number of television and radio documentaries including
the BAFTA nominated Chemistry: A Volatile History and The Secret Life of Chaos (winner of Best
Film Award at the 2010 International Science Films Festival in Athens). In 2008, he became the
youngest ever recipient of the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize for science communication.
http://www.jimal-khalili.com/ @jimalkhalili
Professor Johnjoe McFadden is an academic and author. He is holds a chair in molecular genetics
at the University of Surrey and is a world-leading specialist in tuberculosis. He sits on several
national and international research grant panels. His book QUANTUM EVOLUTION was published
by HarperCollins and Norton in 2010. He edited the book, HUMAN NATURE: Fact and Fiction, and
writes articles for newspapers including the Guardian, the Washington Post and Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung. He has also given popular science talks at public meetings including the
Cheltenham Science Festival and the Green Man Festival and appeared as a panel guest in radio
programmes such as The Moral Maze. His work has been featured in TV documentaries.
http://www3.surrey.ac.uk/qe/
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Transworld
Crown
May 2014
February 2015
110,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Greece (Travlos), Italy (Bollati Boringhieri), Russia (AST)
36
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
SOPHIA
Daughter of a King Who Lost a Kingdom, God-Daughter
of the Queen Who Took it From Him
Anita Anand
This is the extraordinary story of Sophia Duleep Singh, Princess-in-exile,
suffragette and revolutionary. Born in England in 1876, Sophia’s father
was the Maharajah Duleep Singh, once ruler of one of the mightiest
empires in India. Her mother was the beautiful Bamba, illegitimate
daughter of a German businessman and an Abyssinian slave. Her
Godmother was Queen Victoria herself, the Empress of India and the
woman who would ultimately be blamed for the destruction of Sophia’s
dynasty.
Sophia was destined to pursue a happy life, living in England in the lap
of luxury. Instead she became a rebel, and an embarrassing thorn in the
side of the British government and the crown.
After a trip to her father’s old Kingdom in India, one he himself had been forbidden to make, the
princess underwent a dramatic transformation. Almost overnight, she turned from the darling of
high society, to a banner-wielding suffragette, who thought nothing of throwing herself in front of
the car of the Prime Minister himself to demand votes for women. She made her finest stand,
refusing to pay taxes till all women were given the vote. Sophia also battled to improve conditions
for the Lascars – Indian sailors abandoned penniless on British soil by the East India Company –
and nursed Indian soldiers who had fought valiantly for Britain in the Great War.
She lived in world-changing times, with Emmeline Pankhurst, Queen Victoria, Mahatma Gandhi and
Winston Churchill just a few members of the supporting cast in her extraordinary life. In many ways
this is the story of the love-hate relationship between India and Great Britain at a time of
tumultuous conflict and change. But more than anything, it is Sophia’s story.
Anita Anand is a journalist and broadcaster working in London. She has presented The Daily
Politics on BBC 2, and fronted the Drive Time show on 5 Live. She has also appeared on numerous
other programmes across the spectrum from Radio 4 to the BBC Asian network. Since her first child
was born she has scaled back her broadcasting commitments, working on the weekly Double Take
news and current affairs show, as well as Beyond Westminster for Radio 4. The extra time has
given her the luxury of pouring herself into her current obsession, the life of Sophia Duleep Singh.
She lives in London with her husband, the science writer Simon Singh, and their young son Hari.
http://www.anitaanand.net/ @tweeter_anita
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
US Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury
September 2013
Spring 2014
Proposal
90,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
World English langauge rights: Bloomsbury UK
37
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
BORN TO DRUM
Confessions of the World’s Greatest Drummers
Tony Barrell
Why would anyone want to be a drummer?
It’s the hardest job in the band. The most equipment, you’re
practically a roadie. You never get the girl. The lead singer is
taking a water break and you’re left there banging away on a 15
minute drum solo. Your arms ache. Your fingers bleed. And you are
shoved in the back.
Then there are the jokes.
Q: What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians?
A: A drummer!
BORN TO DRUM: Confessions of the World’s Greatest Drummers takes a hard look at these
maligned musicians. Through interviews and some dogged research, Times journalist Tony Barrell
investigates what really makes tub-thumpers tick.
A quest to solve the mystery of why people become drummers, BORN TO DRUM examines the
argument that you might need to be insane to keep the beat (a la Keith Moon).
BORN TO DRUM is a book that celebrates the drummer. Dave Grohl perhaps best sums up the
heart of the book with this quote: ‘Drumming is such a cool thing because not only are you 100%
physically into the music, but you are also hidden behind these big tubs. You almost feel like you’re
in your own little world. You’re just sitting there, beating the shit out of something, and it’s pretty
great.’
Since 1997, Tony Barrell has contributed regular features to The Sunday Times on pop music,
modern art and popular culture. Topics have included The Beatles, Abbey Road Studios, the
longest songs ever recorded, the history of tribute bands, and the world’s strangest concert venues.
Tony has also interviewed and profiled many music stars, such as Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Page,
Shirley Manson, Joan Baez, and Mike Oldfield. Tony is a lifelong fan of drumming and percussion,
and even before embarking on this book project had interviewed several famous drummers,
including Ginger Baker, Butch Vig and Sheila E.
US Publisher
Delivery
US Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Dey Street/HarperCollins
April 2014
Summer 2015
Unedited manuscript
80,000 words approximately
CEK
All rights available excluding US
38
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE TRAINABLE CAT
Dr John Bradshaw and Dr Sarah Ellis
John Bradshaw knows cats. CAT SENSE brims with impossibly
many details sure to engage owners and animal lovers alike –
and possibly even felines
– Alexandra Horowitz, author of INSIDE OF A DOG on CAT
SENSE
It is written in a friendly and engaging way, has helpful tips for
cat owners and is packed with excellent cat facts... Some of
the most interesting parts indicate holes in our current scientific
knowledge
– Steven Pool, Guardian on CAT SENSE
This fascinating book is one of the finest ever written about cats. There was hardly a page where I did not learn
something new, and John Bradshaw’s many practical suggestions are truly excellent. Any cat lover is bound to discover
in it much that is useful, interesting, and entertaining
– Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP and THE NINE EMOTIONAL LIVES OF CATS on
CAT SENSE
Why would anyone want to start training their cat? The answer is – because it is a sure-fire way of
enriching the bond between cat and owner, while at the same time helping to make the cat’s life
run a great deal smoother. And it’s not at all difficult: contrary to their reputation as inscrutable
loners, cats are both easy and fun to train.
Most cat owners can describe situations in which their cat seems uncomfortable. Sometimes these
will be no more than a source of irritation, such as the cat that abruptly turns and bites its owner
when only a few seconds before it had seemed to be enjoying being stroked, or the cat that
abruptly disappears as soon as its cat carrier is brought out. Other problems will be more
disruptive to the relationship, like the cat that starts peeing in the house soon after a new cat is
added to the household. Yet many cat owners are unaware that all of these issues, and many like
them, can be resolved relatively simply – by training. Training can make cats’ lives happier, by
helping them to overcome their natural inhibitions, fears and anxieties.
Training can also enrich owners’ lives, taking their relationship with their cat to a whole new level.
As owners progress through the various exercises laid out in this book, they will begin to find that
their cat is becoming more responsive to their wishes than they ever imagined, and that the very
act of sharing the exercises brings the cat closer to them, not just literally but also emotionally.
Dr John Bradshaw, formerly head of animal welfare science at the University of Bristol and one
of the world’s leading experts on pet behaviour, is the author of The Sunday Times/New York Times
best-sellers, IN DEFENSE OF DOGS/DOG SENSE (2011), and CAT SENSE (2013). Sarah and John
were featured as expert contributors in the BBC2 Horizon documentaries ‘The Secret Life of the
Cat’ and ‘Little Cat Diaries’, which reached an audience of over 5 million when broadcast in the UK
in June 2013: both have extensive radio and TV experience in the UK, USA and Europe.
Dr Sarah Ellis is a Research Fellow at the University of Lincoln who specialises in cat behaviour,
and is a welfare and behaviour advisor to the charity ‘International Cat Care’.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Penguin Press
Basic Books
July 2015
July 2016
60-90,000 words
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Germany (Kosmos), Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam)
39
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
RED NOTICE
How I Became Vladimir Putin’s No.1 Enemy
Bill Browder
Bill, you are a genuine American hero
– Senator John McCain to Bill Browder, Washington, June 2012
How do you rebel if you’re born into a family of American communists
and academics? By becoming a capitalist. And what does it take for
that capitalist to change his whole life in a second, to abandon business
and high-stakes investment for the life of a human rights’ campaigner?
Murder.
In Bill Browder’s case, the murder of his principled young tax attorney,
Sergei Magnitsky, who in 2009, after a year-long illegal detention in
Moscow’s medieval prisons, was beaten to death by eight uniformed
prison guards.
RED NOTICE is his account of those two journeys, starting on the South Side of Chicago and moving
through Stanford Business School to the cut-throat world of investment in New York and London in
the 1990s. From there RED NOTICE moves to the Wild East of Moscow, where, in the turbulent
years following the Soviet Union’s collapse, everything was up for grabs. It was in Moscow that Bill
hit his stride, making billions for his investors – and losing it, and making it back – as he hunted out
undervalued assets and battled some of the oligarchs who had stolen much of Russia’s wealth. For
a long time Bill was unwittingly useful to Putin, as he too fought the oligarchs in order to consolidate
his power. But then, quite suddenly, Putin achieved his goals, and in 2005 Bill was unceremoniously
kicked out of Russia.
In writing this book, Bill’s aim is two-fold: to achieve justice for Sergei; and more broadly to
describe how a normal person confronts the most adverse situations, across a spectrum from
intimidation and defamation to murder. Many people have written about Russia as observers, but
never has there been a book written from the inside, exposing how the Russian government has
become a criminal enterprise with all the powers of the state. For fans of LIAR’S POKER, THE FIRM
and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, RED NOTICE is a story that must be told. @Billbrowder
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bantam/Transworld
Simon & Schuster
May 2014
Unedited manuscript
100,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Finland (WSOY), France (Kero), Germany (Carl Hanser),
Netherlands (Atlas Contact), Norway (Bazar), Poland (Sonia Draga), Sweden (Albert Bonniers)
40
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE LOOTING MACHINE
Tom Burgis
As China’s formidable economy continues to grow rapidly so does its
appetite for natural resources. An increasing proportion of these raw
materials come from thousands of miles away, from the troubled soils and
rocks of Africa. Despite the natural resource wealth of their continent,
however, only a very small minority of Africans benefit – financially or
otherwise. Much of the wealth generated by the new resource trade finds
its way into the hands of mafia led groups, corrupt businessmen,
government officials and giant multinational companies.
As the Financial Times’ former Lagos and Johannesburg correspondent, Tom Burgis has dedicated
years to delving deep and unearthing shocking stories illustrating both the old and new systematic
plundering of Africa’s natural wealth and to giving voice to the silent millions who gain little or no
benefit despite living on this continent of riches.
THE LOOTING MACHINE digs deeper than any studies on Africa’s resource curse have done
before. Tom has spent prolonged periods in the Niger delta, Angola, South Africa and Guinea
following shadowy oil barons, kicking over stones and revealing the cynical corruption of the
multinational companies at the heart of the exploitation. In THE LOOTING MACHINE Tom presents
a thrilling tour of the underbelly of a continent whose supposed new dawn is tainted on an
unimaginable scale.
Tom Burgis is a Financial Times correspondent, formerly in Johannesburg and Lagos. He is now
based in London where he heads up a team focusing on in-depth investigative reporting.
Shortlisted for Young Journalist of the Year in 2010, Tom frequently appears as a commentator on
the BBC, CNBC and on other international radio and television stations. Intrepid, eloquent and
brave, at 30 Tom is at the forefront of a new generation of great investigative journalists making
the leap to full length narrative non-fiction writing. @tomburgis
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
HarperPress
Public Affairs
May 2014
January 2015
Proposal
90,000 words approximately
SAL
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
41
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
SNOW AND STEEL
Battle of the Bulge 1944-45
Peter Caddick-Adams
Peter Caddick-Adams has brought highly perceptive and much-needed fresh
analysis to this new account of the Cassino battles. Both authoritative and
compellingly written, his immense knowledge and understanding of the Second
World War exudes off every page. It will unquestionably remain the standard text
on this bloody episode of the war for many years to come
– James Holland, author of DAM BUSTERS, on MONTE CASSINO
A quite brilliant piece of writing. Here in a single volume we have a first-rate
expose of two of the war's best known commanders... if Caddick-Adams were a
landscape painter his book would be the equivalent of Monet, full of rich intriguing
colours and patterns. The resultant effect is spectacular, and Caddick-Adams is to
be congratulated on his achievement... a brilliant book written with passion and
verve
– BBC History Magazine Book of the Month on MONTY AND ROMMEL
Peter Caddick-Adams is one of the leading military historians of his generation compared to James
Holland, John Keegan, Anthony Beevor and Max Hastings. In this, his third book, he reviews one of
the great final engagements of WW2: The Battle of the Bulge.
SNOW AND STEEL will be a huge reassessment of Hitler’s last great throw of the dice: ‘The Battle
of the Bulge’, the battle for the Ardennes 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945. This is an
utterly fascinating five weeks when for a time it looked like Hitler had outflanked the allied armies
pushing toward the Rhine and might just throw them back to the Normandy beaches. It is also the
context for the catastrophic events at Bastogne depicted so graphically in Band of Brothers.
For military history fans this is one of those touchstone battles of the second world war, written by
an author with a fast growing, world-wide reputation. Peter will use primary archival material and
personal interviews to write a controversial, commercial, landmark book.
Peter Caddick-Adams is a Lecturer at the UK Defence Academy specialising in military history and
media operations working alongside the late Richard Holmes. His special areas of interest are
battlefield history and he researches in Military Doctrine and Leadership. He has led over 200
visits to more than 50 battlefields around the world. He joined the Territorial Army in 1985 and
served as a military media advisor in the rank of major. He is the author of several non-fiction
books, most recently MONTY AND ROMMEL: Parallel Lives (Arrow, 2012) and MONTE CASSINO:
Ten Armies in Hell (Arrow, 2013).
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Preface/Random House
Oxford University Press
September 2014
Unedited manuscript
400 pages
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
42
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
JOAN OF ARC
A History
Helen Castor
Helen Castor has an exhilarating narrative gift... I think readers will love this book
– Hilary Mantel, author of WOLF HALL, on SHE-WOLVES
A gripping book... SHE-WOLVES is a superb history of the powerful women who
have surrounded England’s throne, combining blood-drenched drama, politics, sex,
and swordplay wth scholarly analysis, sympathy for the plight of women, and
elegant writing
– Simon Sebag Montefiore, Daily Telegraph on SHE-WOLVES
Splendidly entertaining... SHE-WOLVES is the literary equivalent of a medieval
banquet: long, rich, and immensely enjoyable
– The Sunday Times on SHE-WOLVES
On 23 February 1429, a little band of six armed men arrived, dusty
from the road, at the great castle of Chinon. With them rode a
girl, dressed as a boy, her dark hair cut short. Her name was Joan,
and she had come with a message from God.
We all know the story of Joan of Arc. A peasant girl who hears voices from God. A warrior
leading an army to victory, in an age that believes women cannot fight. The Maid of Orléans, and
the saviour of France. Burned at the stake as a heretic at the age of just nineteen. Five hundred
years later, a saint.
We know Joan so well because her case was heard in court twice over. One trial, in 1431,
condemned her; the other, twenty-five years after her death, cleared her name. In the transcripts,
we hear first-hand testimony from Joan, her family and her friends: a rare survival from the
medieval world. What could be more revealing?
But all is not as simple as it seems, because this is a life told backwards – a story already shaped
by the knowledge of what Joan would become.
In JOAN OF ARC: A HISTORY, Helen Castor tells this gripping story afresh: forwards, not
backwards, setting this extraordinary girl within her extraordinary world where no one – not
Joan herself, nor the people around her, princes, bishops, soldiers or peasants – knew what would
happen next.
Helen Castor is a medieval historian and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
BLOOD & ROSES, her biography of the 15th-century Paston family, was longlisted for the
Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's Beatrice White Prize in 2006. Her
last book SHE-WOLVES: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth was widely selected as
one of the books of the year for 2010. She presents Radio 4’s Making History and documentaries
for BBC television, including a three-part series based on SHE-WOLVES and, most recently,
Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death. http://www.helencastor.com/
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Faber & Faber
October 2014
Unedited manuscrupt
85,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
43
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
HALF LIFE
The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo: Physicist Or Spy
Frank Close
A thoroughly researched and well-crafted narrative
– New Scientist on THE INFINITY PUZZLE
Masterpiece... I never normally give 5 stars but for this I make an exception
– John Gribbin, BBC Focus on THE INFINITY PUZZLE
In 1950, at the height of the cold war, Bruno Pontecorvo, a brilliant
atomic physicist, defected from Harwell to the Soviet Union. A
United States Congressional committee branded him ‘the second
most dangerous spy in history’. But if he was a spy, what
information did he hand over, when, and to whom?
The 60 year old mystery of his sudden disappearance, and his immense value to the Soviet Union
has now been solved. It involves passing blue prints of a nuclear reactor, the theft of the materials
for an atomic bomb, Klaus Fuchs and Pontecorvo being positioned like chess pieces in order to give
the Soviets the best access to atomic secrets, and arch-spy Kim Philby tipping off the Soviets that
the FBI were on Pontecorvo’s tail.
Pontecorvo’s defection prevented him from becoming internationally recognized as one of the
greatest scientists of the 20th century. His move to the Soviet Union at the age of 37 split his life
into two almost equal halves. Already recognized as a genius before his defection, during his time
in the Soviet Union he had two further seminal ideas, each of Nobel Prize-winning quality.
However, other physicists won the awards, while Pontecorvo missed out because he was effectively
a prisoner in the Soviet Union. He was refused admittance to a nuclear reactor to perform one
critical experiment; not allowed to travel outside the USSR to CERN, in Geneva, to perform
another; and was forced to publish in Russian journals, which remained unknown in the west for two
years, by which time others had come up with the ideas, and done the experiments which led to
Nobel Prizes for themselves.
HALF LIFE is a fascinating tale of intrigue, espionage and nuclear secrets, the full extent of which
has never been told before.
Frank Close is Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. A long-time science writer, Close is
a past recipient of the Kelvin Medal from the Institute of Physics for his contributions to the public
understanding of physics. He is the author of many books, including NEUTRINO, NOTHING, THE
COSMIC ONION, and THE INFINITY PUZZLE, and has written or presented for Nature, the BBC,
and other media outlets. In 2000 he was awarded the OBE for Services to Research and the Public
Understanding of Science, and in 2013 he was awarded the 2013 Michael Faraday Prize for his
excellent work in science communication. He lives with his wife in Abingdon, England.
http://frankclose.net/ @closefrank
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
OneWorld
Basic Books
May 2014
Spring 2015
90,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Italy (Einaudi)
44
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
10% HUMAN
Alanna Collen
There’s more to being human than you think.
You are just 10% human. For every one of the cells that make your body,
there are nine impostor cells, hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and
blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but bacteria and fungi. Over
your lifetime, you will carry the equivalent weight of five African
elephants in microbes. You are not an individual, but a colony.
Far from being passive free-loaders, the trillions of microbes that live on and in you are intimately
involved in running your body. Science is revealing that the modern epidemics of ‘Western’
diseases – obesity, mental health problems, gut disorders, allergies, autoimmunity, and even cancer
– have their root in our failure to cherish our most fundamental and enduring relationship: that with
our personal colony of microbes.
Over the past 60 years, our microbial companions have been the unwitting collateral damage in
the war against humanity’s greatest adversary: germs. Antibiotics, antibacterial cleaners, and our
obsession with hygiene have brought huge losses to the home front, compounded by our rapidly
changing diets. At birth, our microbes set up residence, gifted by our mothers, but Caesarean
sections and bottle feeding are on the rise, and these alter the community we carry for the rest of
our lives. Unlike our human cells, though, we can change our microbes for the better.
Alanna Collen brings the game-changing science behind the microbial revolution to life, providing
a revelatory guide to the role of your body’s microbes in health and happiness. This is popular
science at its most relevant: life will never seem the same again.
Born in 1983, Alanna Collen was educated at Imperial College London, and completed a PhD in
evolutionary biology at University College London. During her scientific career, Alanna wrote for
the Sunday Times Magazine, as well as about wildlife for ARKive.org. She has appeared on
numerous radio and television programmes, including BBC Radio 4’s Tribes of Science and
Saturday Live, and BBC One’s adventure-wildlife show Lost Land of the Volcano. A brief encounter
with ticks in a Malaysian rainforest in 2005 led to a protracted dependence on antibiotics and the
subsequent recognition that she needed her good microbes as much as they needed her. 10%
HUMAN is her first book.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
HarperCollins
HarperCollins
December 2014
Autumn 2015
100,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Finland (Alligaattori Kustannus), France (JC Lattes), Germany
(Riemann Verlag), Japan (Kawade Shobo Shinsha), Korea (Sigongsa), Taiwan (Sun Color)
45
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE GHOST OF A PICTURE
Laura Cumming
Wonderful… That rare thing: an art book where the text is so
enthralling the pictures almost seem like an interruption
– Julian Barnes, Guardian on A FACE TO THE WORLD
Intelligent, humorous, swinging freely between erudition and
colloquialism. I immediately found myself at home in this book,
feeling as though I’d been reading and thinking about this
subject all my life
– Jonathan Coe on A FACE TO THE WORLD
Positively fizzes with ideas; just about every single paragraph
contains a fresh observation
– Nick Hornby, Observer on A FACE TO THE WORLD
Books that combine scholarship, insight, knowledge and a beguiling prose style are as rare as hen's teeth. But this book
is one of them. Cumming writes like a dream, making sharp, revealing observations about artists and their work
– Frank Whitford, The Sunday Times on A FACE TO THE WORLD
In rural Oxfordshire in the mid Nineteenth Century, a young man bought a painting at auction for
£8. Within months, a local Earl had offered him a hundred times that price, but, he insisted, the
painting wasn’t for sale. This, the young man was convinced, was the treasure of the age, a lost
portrait by Diego de Velazquez, Spain’s greatest and most enigmatic painter. The picture would
ruin his life.
From the age of 24, Velazquez was appointed court painter to Philip IV and, aside from a single
trip to Italy, his life and paintings were trapped within the gilded cage of the palace grounds.
Over two centuries later, the young owner of this purported masterpiece, convinced – in the face
of critics, and with little evidence available – that he had a genuine Velazquez, moved to New
York where the public might hear his claims. He left his family and lost his fortune in the process.
Two stories will converge: that of a self-educated man devoting his life to one painting, in an age
before public access to any the great European art existed; and the story of Velazquez himself,
devoting his life to the depiction of one tiny world, elite and self-contained, in which he himself is
hidden away.
In an era before widespread photography, when few records were kept, and art writing as we
now know it didn’t yet exist, this is a book about obsession, about one of the greatest painters of
all time, and about his forgotten champion.
Laura Cumming is Chief Art Critic of the Observer and daughter of the Scottish painter James
Cumming. She has presented Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3, produced art programmes for the BBC
and been variously art or literary editor of the New Statesman, The Listener and the Literary Review.
Her first book, A FACE TO THE WORLD, was published in 2010 by HarperPress to widespread
critical acclaim. @LauraCummingArt
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Chatto/Random House
Scribner/Simon & Schuster
Spring 2015
Unedited manuscript
90,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Netherlands (Atlas-Contact)
46
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
HOW TO LIVE
Book 1: How We Are
Vincent Deary
We live in small worlds. In the movies we are shown a routine and
comfortable life, a small world, one that is soon to end. The Act One
– our normal, soon-to-be-over world – ends quickly, as we get stuck
in Act Two, the new world of change and adjustment. That’s where
the drama is, that’s what we pay to see.
In life the balance is different. Our Act Ones, our normal lives, tend
to last for longer. We are creatures of habit, and like it that way.
Unless we are uneasy, unless something disturbs us from within or
without, we tend to keep things the way they are. But, inevitably,
something will eventually interrupt our routine lives. And with some
ingrained physiological inertia and reluctance, we will begin the
process of change, Act Two.
These two acts are the subject of HOW WE ARE, the first in a planned trilogy. This trilogy, HOW
TO LIVE, will be a journey of understanding. It examines what makes us human: how we work, how
we break, and how, eventually, we mend. It reveals how much of our lives are lived automatically,
how resistant we are to deliberate change, yet also how each of us can and must change our lives
nonetheless. By opening his experience, Vincent Deary will show us the way to make our acts truly
ours.
Vincent Deary is 48, Scottish, and a psychologist whose main focus is the science and practice of
changing lives for the better. He currently holds three National Institute of Health Research grants
and divides his time between his clinical practice and an academic position at the University of
Northumbria. A former holder of the prestigious Medical Research Council fellowship, Vincent
worked for 23 years as a psychologist in London before moving home to Scotland and then
Newcastle, and has published widely in the academic and popular press.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Penguin Press
Farrar Strauss & Giroux
September 2014
Unedited manuscript
80,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (FSG), Brazil (Companhia Das Letras), Germany (Droemer
Knaur), Japan (under offer), Portugal (Temas e Debates), Romania (Humanitas)
World English language rights: Penguin Press
47
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
ROGUE ELEPHANT
Harnessing the Power of India’s Disorderly Democracy
Simon Denyer
Denyer excels in the self-appointed task of historian... [his] in-depth-reporting with a
forensic eye... is an extraordinarily hard-hitting, biting, candid tale of post-democratic
India... No foreign correspondent has ever shown this kind of rare courage and
sensitivity
– Ashwani Kumar, Financial Times
Going by the sheer expanse of his reportage, his ability to gain access to almost every
important actor of this period and to cater to the alternative view while drawing
conclusions, Denyer does justice to his trade
– Indian Express
[Denyer] gets to the heart of India’s prickliest issues to paint a compelling picture... an
interesting and thought-provoking read on modern Indian politics
– Business Standard
When Jyoti Singh Pandey was gang-raped and murdered aboard a moving bus in New Delhi in
December 2012, it provoked a wave of revulsion and anger across India that led to weeks of
protest. The incident underlined the breakdown in law and order, and the pathetic status of women
in the world’s largest democracy, but in the reaction of the people there were also some glimmers
of hope. Laws have already been changed, and the complacency towards the plight of India’s
women is finally being challenged.
Just five years ago, India was sitting on top of the world, an emerging world power being courted
by the world’s powerful political and business leaders. Today, it is suffering an immense crisis of
confidence, beset by corruption scandals, its economy so mismanaged that it suffered the worst
blackout in global history in 2012, and its image badly tarnished by its treatment of women.
Yet all is far from lost. The people of India are fed up, and millions have taken to the streets in
recent years in an attempt to force their government to reform. Twenty-four-hour television news
and one of the world’s most effective Right to Information campaigns have shone a new light into
the darkest corners of Indian politics and bureaucracy. Democracy has deepened and been
reinvigorated in the past decade, and the pressure for change is mounting.
ROGUE ELEPHANT: Harnessing the Power of India’s Disorderly Democracy explains just what has
gone wrong for India in recent years, and how its disorderly democracy could set things right.
Simon Denyer is the Washington Post’s India Bureau Chief and has spent seven of the past nine
years in the country. He has spent two decades as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and the
Washington Post, ranging from New York to Nairobi, from Washington to Kabul and Tripoli. He
has appeared frequently on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, PBS, Sky News and all the major Indian
news channels. He has a degree in economics from Cambridge, and is the co-editor of FOREIGN
CORREDPONDENT: Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia, an anthology of articles about events on
the Indian subcontinent. @simondenyer
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury
27 March 2014
448 pages
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Bloomsbury), India (Bloomsbury India)
World English language rights: Bloomsbury
48
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE GOOD PSYCHOPATH’S
GUIDE TO SUCCESS
How To Use Your Inner Psychopath To
Get the Most Our of Life
Kevin Dutton and Andy McNab
What is a good psychopath? And how can thinking like one help you
to be the best that you can be?
Professor Kevin Dutton has spent a lifetime studying psychopaths. He
first met former SAS hero Andy McNab during a research project.
What he found surprised him. McNab is a diagnosed psychopath but
he is a good psychopath. Unlike a bad psychopath, he is able to dial
up or down qualities such as ruthlessness, fearlessness, conscience and
empathy to get the very best out of himself – and others – in a wide
range of situations.
Drawing on the combination of Andy McNab’s wild and various experiences and Professor Kevin
Dutton’s expertise in analysing them, together they have explored the ways in which a good
psychopath thinks differently and what that could mean for you. What do you really want from
life, and how can you develop and use qualities such as charm, coolness under pressure, selfconfidence and courage to get it? THE GOOD PSYCHOPATH’S GUIDE TO SUCCESS gives you a
unique and entertaining road-map to self-fulfilment both in your personal life and your career.
Kevin Dutton is lecturer in psychology and senior research fellow at St Edmund’s College,
University of Cambridge. He is also Professor for the Public Engagement with Psychological Science
at the University of Essex. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, and a member of the
Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy. Professor Dutton has organized and spoken at
meetings and conferences across the world, and his work has been published in leading
international scientific journals including the Journal of Experimental Psychology and Cognition and
Emotion. His first two popular books, FLIPNOSIS and THE WISDOM OF PSYCHOPATHS (William
Heinemann 2010 and 2012), sold into eighteen languages.
http://kevindutton.co.uk/ @profkevindutton
Andy McNab was found in a carrier bag on the steps of Guy’s Hospital, and has lived an
extraordinary life ever since. He became a soldier at a very young age waging war against the
IRA, and then a member of 22 SAS Regiment. During the Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two
Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, ‘will remain in regimental history for
ever’. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM) during his
military career, McNab was the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he
finally left the SAS. Since then he has become a worldwide bestselling author; alongside the
bestselling Nick Stone thrillers, he has written three non-fiction bestsellers and various fiction, nonfiction and young adult titles. McNab also lectures to security and intelligence agencies in both the
USA and UK, works in the film industry advising Hollywood on everything from covert procedure to
training civilian actors to act like soldiers, writes for a variety of newspapers and magazines and
campaigns tirelessly as a spokesperson and fundraiser for both military and literacy charities.
http://www.andymcnab.co.uk/ @The_Real_McNab
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bantam Press/Transworld
May 2014
Unedited manuscript
80,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
49
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE PERFECT THEORY
A Century of Geniuses and the
Battle Over General Relativity
Pedro Ferreira
Even readers with zero scientific background will enjoy this finely written survey
of one of the greatest of recent scientific endeavours, and get a real feel for the
social and human aspects of science
– Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal
This is a fascinating introduction to our present understanding of space, time, and
gravity... Ferreira tells the story without equations or graphs, just well-chosen
words about the science and how it grew
– James Peebles, Scientist
An enthusiastic and comprehensible popular account... Ferreira does not
downplay relativity’s complexity and avoids the easy route of oversimplifying it
into a cosmic magic show. The result is one of the best popular accounts of how
Einstein and his followers have been trying to explain the universe for decades
– Kirkus
Einstein’s Theory of Space Time is arguably the most perfect intellectual achievement of modern
physics. Ever since Newton, scientists have believed that gravity is a force of attraction, almost like
a magnet; but Einstein showed us a vision of space as a crumpled sheet, and his elegant Field
Equations predicted how it changes shape according to the mass of certain objects.
The Field Equations have remained untouched for almost a century, explaining how the biggest
forces in the universe work. In an attempt to fix what he saw as a problem with the equations,
Einstein invented something called the ‘cosmological constant’, a mysterious force which pushes the
universe apart and stops it from imploding. After it was proven that the universe is expanding, he
regarded the cosmological constant as a ‘blunder,’ and the idea hasn’t had much currency since.
Through the twentieth century, Einstein’s Theory has been by turns praised, ignored and denounced.
With the development of String Theory and Quantum Physics, there have been many challenges to
Einstein’s equations and many competing theories, but with new technology that allows us to look
back thirteen billion years into our past, it’s beginning to look like there might be a cosmological
constant after all...
Pedro Ferreira is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor of
Oriel College. He has been a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley and at CERN
in Geneva, and has held a university research fellowship of the Royal Society. He works on the
origin and evolution of the universe with a special emphasis on how the complexity of the cosmos
emerged. http://www.pedroferreira.co.uk/ @PedroTGFerreira
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Little, Brown
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
February 2014
Edited manuscript
100,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Companhia das Letras), China (Hunan Science &
Technology Press), Finland (Terra Cognita), Germany (C.H. Beck), Greece (Travlos), Italy (Rizzoli), Japan (NHK), Korea
(Kachi Publishing), Netherlands (Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep), Poland (Proszynski Media), Portugal (Presenca),
Russia (Piter), Spain (Anagrama), Taiwan (Commonwealth Publishing)
50
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
A KIM JONG-IL PRODUCTION
Paul Fischer
A KIM JONG-IL PRODUCTION tells the extraordinary story of the
golden couple of South Korean cinema, director Shin Sang-Ok and
actress Choi Eun-Hee. Having fallen in love, married in the mid- to late
twentieth century and then divorced, both were kidnapped in 1978 by
Kim Jong-Il, the soon-to-be dictator of North Korea.
Over the next five years, Choi was kept in cloistered luxury, while Shin –
who twice tried and failed to escape – was thrown into political prison,
where he was deprived, indoctrinated and tortured, all because of Kim’s
determination that he should make propaganda movies for the North
Korean state. Finally, when Shin relented, they were reunited and Kim,
then the head of propaganda, put them to work.
For three years, with a $3 million rolling credit line, they made films for the North Korean dictator,
including a communist rip-off of Godzilla. All the while they planned their escape, which they
finally staged, daringly, in Austria, in May 1986: an escape that involved a fake lunch meeting, a
car chase through central Vienna, and a mad dash for the US embassy...
Gripping, fascinating and wonderfully told, A KIM JONG-IL PRODUCTION shines light on a
reclusive country at a decisive moment in its history, through the lens of a story so surreal and
riveting it could only be true. It is not, like so many books about North Korea, a story of a nation at
odds with the world. It is instead the story of a nation at odds with itself and of a leader, Kim
Jong-Il, at odds with his own ambitions.
Paul Fischer is 26. Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in France, Paul studied social sciences at the
Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and film at the University of Southern California and the New
York Film Academy. He has worked as an independent film producer in London for the past seven
years. Paul’s first feature film, the documentary Radioman, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Doc
NYC festival and was released in cinemas to critical acclaim. As a writer he has written the short
film The Body, starring Alfie Allen (‘Game of Thrones’) and Hannah Tointon (‘The Inbetweeners’). He
has written about film for Gorilla Magazine, Vertigo Magazine, regional newspapers throughout
England, and for JoBlo.com, one of Entertainment Weekly’s top 25 entertainment sites with 1.5
million monthly visitors. His writing has been recognized by the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writers
Program and the Save Our Scripts development program. He was shortlisted in 2011 for the
Hospital Club’s Creatives in Residence program. A KIM JONG-IL PRODUCTION will be his first
book. @tencents77
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Viking/Penguin
Flatiron/Macmillan
May 2014
May 2015
Partial manuscript
90,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Record), Czech Republic (Argo), Finland (Atena), France
(Flammarion), Germany (Rowohlt), Italy (Bompiani), Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam), Poland (Sonia Draga), Serbia
(Laguna)
51
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
NEMESIS
The Battle for Brazil
Misha Glenny
This extraordinarily powerful book demonstrates how utterly we lack the shared
supranational tools needed to fight cybercrime. Essential reading
– Roberto Saviano, author of GOMORRAH on DARKMARKET
Glenny presents a host of extraordinary characters as he tells the story of the past 20
years of online crime... This is a gripping tale, brilliantly researched
– Sunday Times Culture Magazine on DARKMARKET
To date, the best insight we’ve got into the arcane world of cybercrime
– John Naughton, Observer on DARKMARKET
In the early hours of November 10th, 2011, police stopped a Toyota Corolla after it emerged from
Rocinha, the largest slum in Rio de Janeiro. From inside the boot, officers hauled out a man,
wrapped in a tarpaulin. The detectives could hardly believe their luck. They were looking upon the
large round eyes and short curly hair of Antônio Francisco Bonfim Lopes. Despite the hour, a cop
rang José Mariano Beltrame, Secretary for Security in Rio. ‘Mr. Secretary, we’ve got him. We have
arrested Nem!’
Through the story of Nem, Brazil’s most wanted criminal, to whom the author has been granted
exclusive access, and the man who hunted him down, Senhor Beltrame, Misha Glenny examines how
a country on the cusp of greatness could still fail to make the big league.
Sex, crime, corruption, music, power, religion, poverty, money, the environment, film and football
will all be important themes as Misha Glenny uncovers the real stories of the new Brazil.
Behind the gripping narrative of Nem and his capture, Misha will be asking whether Brazil is yet in
a position to overcome the throttling institutional legacies of colonialism and dictatorship to become
a world leader?
NEMESIS: The Battle for Brazil will take us to the most unexpected places while also reshaping our
thinking about the long term economic and political impact of Brazil on global society and politics.
Misha Glenny is a distinguished journalist and historian. As the Central Europe Correspondent, first
for the Guardian and then for the BBC, he chronicled the collapse of Communism and the wars in
former Yugoslavia. He is the author of three books on Eastern Europe and the Balkans, as well as
the international bestseller MCMAFIA, and DARKMARKET, a book on cybercrime. He has regularly
been consulted by US and European governments on major policy issues, and ran an NGO for
three years, assisting with the reconstruction of Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo. He now lives in
London. @MishaGlenny
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bodley Head/Random House
Alfred A. Knopf
January 2015
Autumn 2015
Proposal
70,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Canada (Anansi), Brazil (Companhia das Letras), Germany
(Klett Cotta), Netherlands (Ambo Anthos), Portugal (Bertrand), Spain (Peninsula)
52
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE NETWORKED COLONY
What Ant Ecology Can Teach Us About Brains, Cancer
and the Internet
Deborah M. Gordon
There is no one in charge in an ant colony. Ants make decisions based on
bumping into other ants. Put an ant on its own in a dish and it will die.
Watch a few ants trying to do something and you will end up wanting to
help them. But somehow, out of their bumbling individual behaviour,
emerges the efficient, adaptive, beautifully responsive behaviour of the
whole colony.
There are over 11,000 species of ant covering every surface of our
planet, each with their own remarkable adaptations. But what are the
rules which govern the complex system of the colony, and how did they
evolve?
The answers have implications which stretch far beyond the world of the ants. In many seemingly
disparate areas of research, from cancer to engineered systems like the internet, we have begun
to discover common principles that could lead us to new discoveries about networks we don’t yet
understand.
Deborah M. Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University.
Her research is on the behavior and ecology of ants: how colonies are organized, how colonies in a
population interact, the evolution of behaviour, and the ecology of invasive species such as the ants
in your kitchen. Professor Gordon has been a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and
a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. In 2001 she was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship. She has written two books, ANTS AT WORK (Free Press, 1999) and ANT
ENCOUNTERS (Princeton University Press, 2010). Professor Gordon has also delivered many talks
about her research, notably at Google’s Tech Talks in 2008.
US Publisher
Delivery
US Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Palgrave
November 2014
June 2015
Proposal
70,000 words approximately
APC
All rights available excluding US
53
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
A BUZZ IN THE MEADOW
Dave Goulson
Dave Goulson’s A STING IN THE TALE is a gloriously warm-hearted, bustling,
funny, true and wonder-filled bumblebee of a book
– Mark Cocker, author and naturalist on A STING IN THE TALE
[Goulson’s] book is not only enormously informative, but also hugely
entertaining: its light touch and constant humour make cutting-edge research a
pleasure to read about. For anyone interested in the natural world, this is
essential reading
– Michael McCarthy, Independent on A STING IN THE TALE
Goulson combines enthusiasm with academic authority, addressing the amateur
beekeeper and professional apiarist in well-judged proportion
– Ian Finlayson, The Times on A STING IN THE TALE
In A BUZZ IN THE MEADOW Goulson tells the story of how in 2003 he bought a derelict farm in
the heart of rural France, together with 33 acres of surrounding meadow. He wanted to create a
place for his beloved bumblebees to thrive. But other creatures live there too, a myriad of insects
of every kind, many of them ones that Goulson has studied before in his career as a biologist. You
will learn about how a deathwatch beetle finds its mate, about the importance of houseflies, why
butterflies have spots on their wings, about dragonfly sex, bed-bugs and wasps. Goulson is
brilliant, and very funny, at showing how scientists actually conduct experiments.
The book is also a wake-up call, urging us to cherish the protect life on earth in all its forms.
Goulson has that rare ability to persuade you to go out into your garden or local park and get
down on your hands and knees andlook. The undiscovered glory that is life in all its forms on
planet Earth is there to be discovered. And if we learn to value what we have, perhaps we will
find a way to keep it.
A STING IN THE TALE, Dave Goulson’s account of a lifetime studying bumblebees, was one of the
most gratifying success stories of 2013. Brilliantly reviewed, it was shortlisted for the Samuel
Johnson Prize for the best non-fiction book of the year. A BUZZ IN THE MEADOW is another call to
arms for nature lovers everywhere.
Professor Dave Goulson is Professor of Biology at Sussex University, and is one of the UK’s most
respected conservationists. He was brought up in rural Shropshire, where he developed an early
obsession with wildlife that he pursues to this day. He has published over 200 scientific papers and
innumerable popular articles on the ecology and conservation of bumblebees and other insects.
Goulson is author of the Sunday Times bestseller A Sting in the Tale, a popular science book about
bumble bees, published in 2013 by Jonathan Cape and shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
Goulson founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006, a charity which has grown to 10,000
members. He was the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Social Innovator of
the Year in 2010, was given the Zoological Society of London’s Marsh Award for Conservation
Biology in 2013, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013.
@DaveGoulson
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Jonathan Cape/Random House
Picador/Macmillan
September 2014
Unedited manuscript
85,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Germany (Carl Hanser)
54
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
A SMELL OF BURNING
The Story of Epilepsy
Colin Grant
In its toughness and tenderness, as well as its sensuous and telling details, BAGEYE
AT THE WHEEL is a father memoir that deserves to be celebrated... It’s a quietly
unforgettable book about innocence and experience, about memory and cruelty –
and the cruelty of memory
– Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian on BAGEYE AT THE WHEEL
Grant’s memoir is the latest in a long series of accounts of immigration from the
West Indies. As for Grant’s addition to this genre, I must jettison any claims to cool
by confessing that I loved every word of it
– Peter Carty, Independent on BAGEYE AT THE WHEEL
The book is a classic of its kind, in my opinion; if I were Bageye, I would be
immensely proud of it
– Sunday Telegraph on BAGEYE AT THE WHEEL
The sight of someone having an epileptic seizure, thrashing about on the ground in public, unsettles
and intrigues as it does witnesses to a car crash. We are drawn in and repelled at the same time.
For thousands of years epileptics were thought to be cursed, the victims of a sacred disease for
which there was no cure.
Our prejudice towards “feeble-minded” epileptics has been complicated by the revelations of a
number of exceptional figures who were diagnosed in their lifetime or retrospectively suspected of
having the condition – including Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and George
Gershwin. Even so epilepsy has generated extraordinary levels of fear and revulsion in the course
of history. Abandoned as infants, epileptics have been barred from work, excluded from marriage
and locked up with those deemed to be insane.
Christopher, Colin Grant’s brother, wrestled with the impact of this condition on his life. Grant
attended him at all his major fits. Alongside Grant’s rendering of epilepsy in medical history and
contemporary culture, he chronicles the progression of Christopher’s episodic seizures with pathos
and humour, up till his sudden unexpected death in epilepsy at the age of thirty-eight.
In A SMELL OF BURNING, Colin Grant explores the role that epilepsy and epileptics have played,
willingly and involuntarily, in the evolution of neurological science. Drawing on primary research,
case histories, literature, visual art and film, Grant presents a rich and varied tapestry of the story
of epilepsy – a world that has never, until now, been explored fully in a book of popular science.
Colin Grant studied medicine for five years at the Royal London Hospital and works as a producer
and presenter in the BBC’s Science Unit. He is the author of three much-praised works of non-fiction,
including BAGEYE AT THE WHEEL, shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerly Prize.
http://www.colingrant.info/ @colincraiggrant
UK Publisher
Delivery
US Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Jonathan Cape
July 2015
January 2016
Proposal
100,000 words approximately
SAL
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
55
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
IN THE INTERESTS OF SAFETY
How to Challenge the Rules That Make
All of Our Lives More Difficult
Michael Hanlon and Tracey Brown
So why do we have to surrender our tweezers at airport
security, when we can carry large glass bottles of
flammable alcoholic spirit onto the plane? Why can’t a
parent take more than two young children to the public
pool? And who decided that a grade seven homework
intranet should have more complex password rules than
the US nuclear arsenal had during the Cold War?
In the past twenty years, safety and security rules have expanded into every part of our lives, and
they are spreading, making our lives more complicated, expensive and frustrating. Very few of
them are making us safer.
In the interests of safety, we are guided out of danger that we never knew we were in. Safety
sentinels patrol American lakes to confine us to knee-high water for safe ‘swimming’. Cyclists can’t
leave their bikes near government buildings because of imaginary bicycle bombs. No-one is
against safety, but when hospitals are in danger of being unable to scan sick children, something
has gone badly wrong.
IN THE INTERESTS OF SAFETY is a rallying cry against unjustified rules. Hanlon and Brown show
that despite its intimidating appearance, much of the safety agenda is built on sand. Crucially,
many safety rules only exist because no-one questions them. By asking for evidence, the authors
show that we can expose whose interests are really being served and insist that rule makers are
held to account.
Michael Hanlon writes for The Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, the Spectator and New Scientist. He is
the author of five popular science books, including THE SCIENCE OF THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO
THE GALAXY; TEN QUESTIONS SCIENCE CAN’T ANSWER YET; and ETERNITY: Our Next Billion
Years. Michael has chased science stories all over the world, participating in a gorilla rescue in the
Congo, becoming lost in central Borneo and experiencing a zero-gravity astronaut training flight
over the Nevada desert. He saw the light about climate change after a swim in a melt-water lake
a mile up the Greenlandic icecap.
Tracey Brown is the Director of Sense About Science. She has led award-winning campaigns to
stop misleading medical claims and to protect independent scientific advice – campaigns which
have changed the UK’s ministerial code and resulted in the 2013 Defamation Bill. She is leading
the AllTrials campaign with the medical writer Ben Goldacre, to challenge secrecy about clinical
trial data. Tracey writes about science, policy and the public, and has edited popular guides to
controversial issues, including GM, chemicals, radiation, climate, statistics and uncertainty. She has
three sons and runs a football club.
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Little, Brown
June 2014
Edited manuscript
80,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
World English language rights: Little, Brown
56
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE HOUSE BY THE LAKE
Thomas Harding
A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history, a scrupulously
dispassionate narrator
– John Le Carré on HANNS AND RUDOLF
Meticulously researched and deeply felt, Hanns and Rudolf is written with a
suppressed fury at the vicious moral emptiness of men like Höss, who were
only following orders
– Ben Macintyre, The Times on HANNS AND RUDOLF
Thomas Harding is a journalist who has uncovered a remarkable story, then
linked it to another... This is a remarkable book, which deserves a wide
readership even among those who think they are bored with the Holocaust
– Max Hastings, The Sunday Times on HANNS AND RUDOLF
THE HOUSE BY THE LAKE is the true story of four families bound by a simple wooden cottage and
a hundred years of turbulent German history. It is the story of four individuals who, in their
different ways, were linked to this tranquil lakeside house: Otto, the landlord, who owned the land
upon which the house was constructed; Elsie, the young Jewish girl who spent weekends and
summers there; Will, the composer and Nazi Party member, who sought refuge at the house during
the war, before fleeing to the greater security of Austria; and Bernd, the young man, who grew up
in the house after the Soviet occupation, and witnessed the construction of the Berlin Wall between
the house and the lake.
This is also the story of loss. For each of these individuals projected their dreams onto the Lake
House, and yet each then lost it to the next ideological wave to sweep through Germany. In
this way, a small house on a lake near Berlin comes to embody the country as a whole. Finally, it is
a story of hope, for we humans can experience terrible suffering and yet in time exercise our
capacity for healing. And if we manage that, a hundred years of grief will have had a positive
outcome.
Thomas Harding is an author and journalist who has written for the Financial Times, The Sunday
Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, among other publications. He co-founded a television station
in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning publisher of a newspaper in West
Virginia. He lives in Hampshire, England. His book HANNS AND RUDOLF was published in the UK,
USA and Canada in September 2013, and is being translated into nine other languages. It was
shortlisted for the Costa Book Award Biography prize in 2013 and is a bestseller in the UK, Israel
and Italy. http://thomasharding.com @thomasharding
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
William Heinemann/Random House
Picador/Macmillan
Spring 2015
Spring 2016
90,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Rocco), Germany (DTV), Italy (Ponte Alle Grazie), Spain
(Galaxia Gutenberg)
57
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
KADIAN JOURNAL
A Father’s Story
Thomas Harding
In July 2012 Thomas Harding’s fourteen-year-old son Kadian was
killed in a bicycle accident. KADIAN JOURNAL is a diary that
Thomas started in the aftermath of the tragedy.
Beginning on the day of Kadian’s death, and continuing to the
year anniversary, and beyond, it is a record of grief in its rawest
form, and of a mind in shock and questioning a strange new
reality. Interspersed within the journal are fragments of memory:
jewel-bright everyday moments that slowly combine to form a
biography of a lost son, and a lost life.
It is an extraordinary document, and several things at once: a
description of a family dislocated by sorrow, a forensic
examination of a catastrophe, and above all else, an attempt to
recover Kadian, in some way.
In the tradition of Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking, C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed and
Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, Thomas Harding’s Kadian Journal is a lucid, raw, and startlingly
brave book: a powerful and moving account of a father’s grief, and a beautiful tribute to an
exceptional son.
Thomas Harding is an author and journalist who has written for the the Financial Times, The Sunday
Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, among other publications. He co-founded a television station
in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning publisher of a newspaper in West
Virginia. He lives in Hampshire, England. His book HANNS AND RUDOLF was published in the UK,
USA and Canada in September 2013, and is being translated into nine other languages. It was
shortlisted for the Costa Book Award Biography prize in 2013 and is a bestseller in the UK, Israel
and Italy. http://thomasharding.com @thomasharding
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
William Heinemann/Random House
Picador/Macmillan
July 2014
Proofs
256 pages
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
58
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE WAR IN THE WEST
James Holland
‘World War II has long been the province of the popular historian
and journalist, but over the last few years a quiet scholarly
revolution has been taking place.’
Professor Gary Sheffield, Professor of War Studies, Birmingham
University
Much of what we think we know about World War II is steeped
in perceptions and myth rather than fact. For the past sixty-five
years, we have looked at this cataclysmic conflict in much the
same way, particularly when it comes to examining the War in
the West – that is, the conflict between the Axis Powers, led by
Nazi Germany, and the Western Allies.
James Holland is a young, dynamic historian with a deep and panoramic knowledge of the Second
World War. Always working from primary sources, Holland has spent the last fifteen years
interviewing surviving combatants, from all sides: civilians, nurses, partners, partisans and the like.
Holland works from the ground level, up to the high command of each conflict, and his audio
research is now so significant – 400 recorded interviews – that The Imperial War Museum in
London has given him his own archive.
THE WAR IN THE WEST will be a revisionist two-volume history of the Second World War, with a
360-degree view-point, representing a completely fresh take on the conflict. By weaving in the
stories of individuals, from the top to the bottom of the chain of command, Holland will show the
human experience of the war – of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events.
James Holland is the author of five works of history: FORTRESS MALTA (2003, a Sunday Times top
10 bestseller), TOGETHER WE STAND: North Africa 1942-1943 (2006), ITALY’S SORROW: A
Year of War 1944-45 (published in 2008 to critical acclaim), THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN (May 2010)
and DAM BUSTERS: The Race to Smash the Dams, 1943 (May 2012). During this time Holland has
also written five fictionalised accounts of the Second World War in the Jack Tanner series
(Bantam/Transworld). He has also written and presented the Bafta shortlisted documentary ‘Battle
of Britain: the Real Story’ and has made a film for the BBC about the Dambusters Raid, that was
transmitted in November 2011. http://www.griffonmerlin.com @James1940
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery Volume 1
Delivery Volume 2
Status
Length
Agent
Bantam/Transworld
Grove Atlantic
June 2014
June 2015
Proposal
100,000 words per Volume
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, China (Chongqing Nutshell Cultural Communication Co),
Netherlands (Athenaeum – Polak & Van Gennep)
59
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
A WOLF BY THE EARS
The Monstrous Deeds of the House of Caesar
Tom Holland
The stain of the wrongs committed back in ancient times by these men
Will never fade from the history books. Until the very end of time,
The monstrous deeds of the House of Caesar will stand condemned.
The lurid glamour of the Julio-Claudians has resulted in
them becoming the very archetypes of feuding and
murderous dynasts. No other period of history can
compare for sheer unsettling fascination with its gallery of
leading characters. Tiberius, grim, paranoid, and with a
taste for having his testicles licked by young boys in
swimming pools; Caligula, lamenting that the Roman
people did not have a single neck, so that he might cut it
off; Agrippina, the mother of Nero, scheming to bring to
power the son who would end up having her murdered;
Nero himself, kicking his pregnant wife to death, marrying
a eunuch, and raising a pleasure palace over the firegutted centre of Rome.
A WOLF BY THE EARS tells the full, terrifying story of the Julio-Claudians. Yet monstrous though the
heirs of Augustus undoubtedly were, and fatal to the venerable traditions of their city’s freedoms,
their record was not merely one of bloodshed and depravity. What some named servitude, many
more welcomed as order. Beyond the court of the Caesars, whether in the slums of Rome or in the
furthermost reaches of her world-spanning empire, the age of the Julio-Claudians was also the first
great age of the Pax Romana. That is why, although the book tells the story of a dynasty, it also
provides a portrait of the entire Roman world.
Tom Holland is the author of the bestseller, RUBICON: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman
Republic (Little, Brown, 2003), PERSIAN FIRE: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
(Little, Brown, 2005), MILLENNIUM: The Eleventh Century and the Making of the West (Little,
Brown, 2008) and IN THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD: Global Empire and the Rise of a New
Religion (Little, Brown, 2012). He has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC
Radio, and is currently working on a fresh translation of Herodotus for Penguin Classics. He lives in
London with his wife and two children. http://www.tom-holland.org/ @holland_tom
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Little, Brown
Doubleday/Random House
Summer 2014
TBA
Proposal
150,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Germany (Klett Cotta), Netherlands (Athenaeum – Polak & Van
Gennep), Norway (Gyldendal)
60
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
SEVERED
A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
Frances Larson
Josiah Wilkinson liked to take Oliver Cromwell’s head to breakfast
parties. He would pass it around on a metal spike to his shocked but
fascinated guests, and the head continued to provide entertainment
until 1960, when the heirloom was given a long-overdue burial.
Think of the severed head and you naturally think of ‘head-hunting’
and of dangerous far-flung corners of South America. Yet the
Western world is not exempt: during the Reign of Terror,
executioners in different French towns competed to see who could
guillotine the most people the fastest, and it was actually Western
collectors who drove the head-hunting epidemics of the nineteenth
century. London Bridge had its own Keeper of the Heads, and people
still flock to Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum to see their famous shrunken
heads.
In the twenty-first century, we are more distanced from the physicality of death than ever before,
but the drama of the severed head has been exploited by soldiers, heads of state, the Church,
artists, scientists and writers. This book will be its compelling, if gruesome, history.
Dr Frances Larson is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Anthropology department at Durham
University. She was previously with the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where she first came into
contact with their famous shrunken heads. In 2009 she published AN INFINITY OF THINGS, a
widely acclaimed biography of Henry Wellcome, the founder of the Wellcome Trust. Her research
focuses on how objects have shaped academic disciplines, institutions such as museums, and
individual people’s lives. http://franceslarson.com @FrancesRLarson
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Portobello
November 2014
Unedited manuscript
100,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Norton), Japan (Kawadeshobo-Shinsha Publishing)
World English language rights: Portobello
61
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE PAPER TRAIL
An Unexpected History of the
World’s Greatest Invention
Alexander Monro
Winner of a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction Work-in-progress
THE PAPER TRAIL is the story of how a Chinese invention
revolutionized written knowledge across Eurasia, from its birth in
China two thousand years ago, to the printing explosion that
galvanised Europe fifteen hundred years later.
It is a journey through politics and religion, as leaders from both
continents ally with paper to ensure ideological influence or
domination. It is a journey of stops and starts, since paper-making in
any significant quantity remained limited to East Asia for seven
centuries, then spread rapidly through the Abbasid Caliphate to
embed the Koran, Koranic commentaries and theological debates in
the cultures of the Dar al Islam. Finally it twinned with printing in
Europe to feed the Renaissance demand for books, and thereby
allow Reformation ideas to gain currency, and ‘heretical’ scientific
ideas to gain ground as a new knowledge culture emerged, driven
by commerce and, in time, a reading public, rather than by Rome.
This book will be the story of how an obsession with the past, and with learning, led to the invention
of paper. This invention sparked a series of explosions of knowledge that led from second century
China to sixteenth century Europe, where the story climaxed with a printing-driven knowledge
revolution focused on the three great founding fathers of European modernity – the Renaissance,
the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Along its path lay several crucial staging posts – in
effect a series of big bang moments that sent knowledge to ever-greater audiences – granting to
the book an entirely new order of power and, to those who could control its production, sway over
the minds of their subjects, compatriots or religious devotees.
Alexander Monro has worked as a Parliamentary researcher, on The Times’ foreign desk, and as
a general news and features reporter for Reuters Shanghai. He was previously the China analyst
at Trusted Sources, where he wrote reports on political risk in China. Alexander has edited a
classical poetry collection, LAMENTS OF FOUR CITIES OF CHINA, which was published by Eland. A
chapter he wrote on Genghis Khan was included in Thames & Hudson’s SEVENTY GREAT
JOURNEYS and he has co-edited an anthology of poetry about the East called DESERT AIR. He
was also sponsored by the Scott Society to trace the route of Genghis Khan through Mongolia on
horseback. His articles have been published by The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian Arts Blog,
Washington Post, Boston Globe, South China Morning Post, New Statesman, New Scientist, AFP and
Reuters. He speaks French and mandarin Chinese, studying the latter at the universities of
Cambridge and Peking. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Penguin Press
Alfred A. Knopf
May 2014
Edited manuscript
100,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Germany (C. Bertelsmann), Italy (Rizzoli), Netherlands (Bezige
Bij)
62
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
HOW THE LEOPARD
CHANGES ITS SPOTS
Polly Morland
Polly Morland expertly weaves scores of riveting stories, fascinating interviews, and
exotic experiences into a ceaselessly engaging investigation of our most-elevated
virtue
– Aron Ralston on THE SOCIETY OF TIMID SOULS
Polly Morland has written a beautiful and extremely moving book about the
quintessentially human trait of bravery... It is gorgeously written, deeply felt, and
sharply researched
– Sebastian Junger, author of THE PERFECT STORM on THE SOCIETY OF TIMID
SOULS
[Morland] approaches her subject with energy, tenacious curiosity and, however much she may protest that she is lilylivered, courage... Her book has astonishing range... This is writing of unusual, sympathetic precision... [a] moving and
uncommon book
– Kate Kellaway, Observer on THE SOCIETY OF TIMID SOULS
They say that the leopard cannot change his spots. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t want to.
After all, were we humans handed a magic wand, most of us would change something, would we
not, about ourselves or our lives?
‘I want to be happier,’ say some. ‘Thinner,’ say others. ‘Healthier’. ‘Calmer.’ ‘Richer’. ‘I’d like to be
more productive,’ says one. ‘A better parent,’ says another. ‘Liked’. ‘Loved’. ‘I,’ – so one man told
the author – ‘I just want to be free.’
As a documentary-maker and a long-time collector of first hand testimony, Polly Morland has spent
her life in pursuit of the stories we tell ourselves and others about our own lives. Here she seeks out
men and women from all around the world who have sought and experienced change in very
different ways, weaving their remarkable testimony together with the latest ideas from
psychology, philosophy and neuroscience to offer a whole new way of thinking about change.
HOW THE LEOPARD CHANGED ITS SPOTS is about the desire for change and about the people
who manage to achieve it. It is about how – with apologies to Jeremiah, who first coined the
phrase – the leopard can change his spots.
Polly Morland is an award-winning writer and documentary-maker. Prior to becoming a writer,
she worked extensively for the BBC, for Channel Four and for the Discovery Channel, tackling
subjects such as the investigation of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, the reclusion of J.D.
Salinger, the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, the economics of organised crime, the rise of
political terrorism in Europe and Latin America and a controversial history of the Bible. Her first
book, THE SOCIETY OF TIMID SOULS: or How To Be Brave, was published in 2013 by Profile
Books in the UK and by Crown/Random House in the US, with French and Chinese language
editions forthcoming. The book won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award, was long-listed
for the Guardian First Book Award and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year in 2013, in the
category of ‘most thought-provoking works’.
UK Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Profile
May 2015
January 2016
75,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
63
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
DEMOCRACY
Alecos Papadatos & Abraham Kawa
Probably the best and certainly the most extraordinary graphic novel I have ever
come across
– Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times on LOGICOMIX
An absolute treat: perkily drawn, packed with wit and colour, and studded with
charmingly scatty elucidations and scenes from the creation of the comic itself
– Telegraph on LOGICOMIX
It’s difficult not to be dazzled... storytelling and intellectual pyrotechnics are
delineated in extraordinarily crisp, cleverly designed and beautifully colored
artwork... Easily one of the most impressive combinations of popular art and
serious history that I've encountered
– Publishers Weekly on LOGICOMIX
From some of the team behind the international phenomenon, LOGICOMIX, which was a New York
Times best-seller for ten weeks, won numerous international prizes, and to date has been sold into
more than twenty-five languages (garnering blanket critical acclaim in each), comes a new graphic
novel... DEMOCRACY, by Alecos Papadatos and Abraham Kawa (writer and graphic novel
expert).
DEMOCRACY opens in Athens in 490 BC, on the eve of the Battle of Marathon. The hero of the
story, Leander, is trying to rouse his comrades for the morrow’s battle against an enemy far
mightier than them. Leander begins to recount his own life story, bearing direct witness to the evils
of the old tyrannical regimes, and to the birth of a new political system. The story that emerges, of
the death of the gods and the tortuous birth of democracy, is crammed with extraordinary
characters, and tells in incident and vivid detail how this greatest of civic inventions came about.
We see that democracy was born through a combination of chance and historical contingency –
but also through the cunning, courage and wilful action of a group of highly talented and driven
men.
Alecos Papadatos worked as an animator, animation director and storyboarder for major
European animation production companies from 1984 to 1994. In 1990 his love for drawing led
him to the print media, where he still writes and draws comics for two Greek newspapers. He spent
2003 to 2008 drawing the graphic novel LOGICOMIX, which went on to become an international
phenomenon. @Alecospapadatos
Dr Abraham Kawa is the author of WHAT SONG THE SIRENS SANG? (2004) a collection of
fantasy and horror stories, as well as SCREAMING SILVER (2009), the first in his ‘Pandora’s Box’
series of paranormal mystery/horror novels. A researcher of graphic novels and genre fiction, he
teaches Cultural Studies at the University of the Aegean. In his academic capacity, he is also the
author of the study VIRTUAL GAZES: Postmodern Narrative in Comic Books, Cinema and Literature
(2002) and has contributed essays and articles in books such as the ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO
SCIENCE FICTION and FIFTY KEY FIGURES IN SCIENCE FICTION (both 2009).
UK Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury
September 2014
Spring 2015
Partial manuscript
250 pages
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Bloomsbury), Brazil (WMF Martins Fontes), France (Editions
Vuibert), Germany (Arche/Atrium), Italy (Guanda), Netherlands (Lebowski)
World English language rights: Bloomsbury
64
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE RIFT
The Future of Africa
Alex Perry
After seven years in Africa, I have come to see the continent’s eventual
geographic destiny as a metaphor for its more immediate human one.
There is always violence. But, inexorably, the land rises. Then it breaks free.
Alex Perry’s lyrical and meticulous seven-year exploration of the new
Africa required a spell in jail, visits to numerous wars and, eventually, his
resignation as a magazine correspondent.
But this is no tale of African woe. On every page, Perry overturns our
preconceptions of the world’s biggest continent, exposing them as selfindulgent, out-of-date and damaging.
A new Africa is rising, one that is lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. And this new economic
and political titan disdains aid, rejects Western pre-eminence and demands sovereign control over
its own affairs. As Perry convincingly demonstrates, this is but one big rift in what will be a
tumultuous transition; pirates, Al Qaeda, cocaine smugglers and youthful revolutionaries will all
play a part.
Africa’s emergence will not be smooth. But the story of the new Africa – astonishing, and largely
untold – is one we all need to know. For it is one in which Africans are not just changing their own
lives, but those of us all.
Alex Perry was born in the US and educated in Britain. He has worked as a foreign correspondent
for seventeen years, covering Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa from postings in London,
Hong Kong, New Delhi and Cape Town, where he has been based since 2006. He has covered
more than thirty wars, and interviewed figures as well-known as the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu
and George Clooney and as diverse as pirates, Al Qaeda members and Bollywood superstars. He
has won numerous awards, though at times his work has been recognized in a different fashion: in
2002, the Indian government tried to deport him and in 2007 Perry was briefly jailed in
Zimbabwe. His is the author of two books; FALLING OFF THE EDGE: Globalization, World Peace
and Other Lies, published in late 2008; and LIFEBLOOD: How to Change the World, One Dead
Mosquito at a Time, published in 2011. THE RIFT: The Future of Africa will be his third, and most
ambitious, book. http://www.alex-perry.com/ @PerryAlexJ
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Little, Brown
January 2015
Unedited manuscript
100,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Germany (S. Fischer), Netherlands (Het Spectrum), Spain (Ariel)
65
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
RELEASE THE BATS
How To Write Without Dying
DBC Pierre
DBC Pierre’s first book, VERNON GOD LITTLE, was brilliant.
LIGHTS OUT is even better... Pierre proves that a book can be
insightful and shocking as well as melancholic and wickedly funny.
Only someone able to take the piss out of themselves and the
world they live in so astutely could pull this off: irresistible
– Time Out, Book of the Week on LIGHTS OUT IN
WONDERLAND
If any novelist can collate the killing irony of what is happening
around us it is DBC Pierre... As with the dextrous ventriloquism in
VERNON GOD LITTLE, Gabriel’s living and very beautiful voice
carries this convulsive novel... This swollen, bruising novel needs to
be defended as an artful shout of protest from a soul on fire
– Alan Warner, Guardian on LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND
Pierre’s writing is heady, reaching glorious heights of linguistic
invention. He shows that he is just as adept at conjuring a sense of
place – this time in Japan and Germany – as he was in his pitch
perfect presentation of the Texan vernacular in his Booker-prize
winning debut, VERNON GOD LITTLE
– Independent on LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND
The more implausible life grows, the more important strong fiction becomes; and now it seems
everyone is writing a novel. It’s said that everyone has a book inside them – but where inside does
it live? How do we get it out?
When DBC Pierre burst onto the literary scene in 2003 he arrived with no particular literary
education and without years of practice. Finding he had something to say he made the journey solo
to that place where dreams and demons live, to try and turn feelings into words.
RELEASE THE BATS aims to explore the mysteries of why and how we tell our stories, and the craft
of writing fiction from scratch, proposing a new way to approach the job and its frustrations. Part
biography, part reflection, and part practical guide, DBC Pierre here invests everything he
learned the hard way, in a book aimed at anyone with a love of ideas, reading, and curious life;
plus notes for those with something to say.
DBC Pierre has worked as a designer and cartoonist, and currently divides his time between the
UK and Ireland. His first novel, VERNON GOD LITTLE, won the 2003 Bollinger Everyman
Woodhouse Award, the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, and the 2003 Man Booker
Prize, and is sold in 43 countries. Pierre’s second novel, LUDMILA’S BROKEN ENGLISH, was
published by Faber in 2006, and his third, LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND, in September 2010.
http://www.dbcpierre.com/
UK Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Faber & Faber
Summer 2014
Summer 2015
100,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
66
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
SALT, SWEAT, TEARS
The Men Who Rowed the Oceans
Adam Rackley
Incredible true stories from the limits of endurance, written by a man who's
been there
– Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Gripping, superior... a profound exploration of the human condition... We who
stay at home need the people who climb mountains, cross oceans, voyage to
the moon, to tell us who we are. Rackley is one of the very few who is both
seaman and historian, who has both the literary skill and the sensory
intelligence to make the rest of us understand what exactly is out there, and
why
– Peter Nichols, author of A VOYAGE FOR MADMEN
Just as some people believe mountains are there to be climbed, a
few dreamers believe oceans are there to be rowed. This is the next
frontier in adventure and endurance.
Fewer people have rowed across the Atlantic than have climbed
Everest.
Adam Rackley is among them. For seventy days he and his rowing partner ate, slept and rowed in
a boat seven meters long and two meters wide, in one of the world’s most extreme environments.
This is his story of adventure, endurance and self-discovery.
They were following in the wake of pioneers. In 1896 a pair of Norwegian fisherman crossed the
2,500 miles in a wooden fishing dory – and their record stood for 114 years. John Fairfax, a
smuggler, gambler and shark hunter, was the first to complete the feat single-handedly in 1969.
Others have followed; some have not survived the attempt. This is their story, too.
Adam Rackley was born in the Netherlands in 1981. He studied PPE at the University of York
before completing an MSc from the University of London in Finance and Financial Law. He has
worked as a fund manager at Montanaro Asset Management and a finance lecturer at BPP
Business School, and was previously a Platoon Commander with the Black Watch at Fort George.
He lives in London and Mumbai with his wife, Alice, and is currently writing a novel about white
collar boxing and the City. SALT, SWEAT, TEARS is Adam’s first book.
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Viking/Penguin
6 March 2014
272 pages
APC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Penguin Books)
World English language right: Viking/Penguin
67
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
DELPHI
A History of the Centre of the Ancient World
Michael Scott
Scott’s passion and expertise are readily apparent... An enjoyable resource for
scholars and students. Additionally, prospective visitors to the modern site of Delphi
will be interested in Scott's brief guide, which is included at the back of the book
– Publishers Weekly
Like the two eagles released by Zeus from opposite ends of the world who then met
in Delphi, Michael Scott gets to the heart of antiquity's most celebrated and enigmatic
oracle. A vivid and lucid study that reanimates the mentality of those who consulted
Apollo more convincingly than any other I have read
– Tom Holland, author of RUBICON and PERSIAN FIRE
Learned and elegant, Michael Scott’s DELPHI offers an in-the-round study of the heart
of ancient Greece, a focus of religion, art, athletics, intrigue, and treasure so potent
that it still gives us an adjective for enigmatic – 'Delphic.' Scott’s irresistible narrative
brings it all back to life
– Barry Strauss, author of MASTERS OF COMMAND
The oracle and sanctuary of the Greek god Apollo at Delphi were known as the ‘omphalos’ – the
‘center’ or ‘navel’ – of the ancient world for more than 1000 years. Individuals, city leaders, and
kings came from all over the Mediterranean and beyond to consult Delphi's oracular priestess; to
set up monuments to the gods in gold, ivory, bronze, marble, and stone; and to take part in athletic
and musical competitions. This book provides the first comprehensive narrative history of this
extraordinary sanctuary and city, from its founding to its modern rediscovery, to show more clearly
than ever before why Delphi was one of the most important places in the ancient world for so long.
In this richly illustrated account, Michael Scott covers the whole history and nature of Delphi, from
the literary and archaeological evidence surrounding the site, to its rise as a center of worship with
a wide variety of religious practices, to the constant appeal of the oracle despite her cryptic
prophecies. He describes how Delphi became a contested sacred site for Greeks and Romans and
a storehouse for the treasures of rival city-states and foreign kings. He also examines the eventual
decline of the site and how its meaning and importance have continued to be reshaped right up to
the present. Finally, for the modern visitor to Delphi, he includes a brief guide that highlights key
things to see and little-known treasures.
A unique window into the center of the ancient world, DELPHI will appeal to general readers,
tourists, students, and specialists.
Michael Scott is assistant professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick. His
books include FROM DEMOCRATS TO KINGS: The Brutal Dawn of a New World from the Downfall
of Athens to the Rise of Alexander the Great (Overlook). He has also written and presented a
number of ancient history documentaries for National Geographic, the History channel, Nova and
the BBC, including one on Delphi. www.michaelscottweb.com @drmichaelcscott
US Publisher
US Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Princeton University Press
Spring 2014
Edited manuscript
100,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding US, Greece (Psichogios), Italy (Laterza), Netherlands (Prometheus)
World English language rights: Princeton University Press.
68
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
ANCIENT WORLD
Michael Scott
We live in a global and connected world. But that is not how we study
history. Instead, we look at events situated in a particular time and
place, isolated from their global contexts. As a result we have a
disconnected sense of the history of our world.
In contrast ANCIENT WORLD offers a chance to shatter the shackles of
how we have so far studied history. The book will focus on some of the
most famous dates in our ancient story: 2000 BC and the completion of
Stonehenge; 508 BC and the origins of democracy; 218 BC and
Hannibal’s march across the Alps as well as 312 AD and Constantine’s
victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge.
But exploring these critical moments is only the beginning. So, yes, democracy may have been
invented in ancient Greece in 508 BC, but what was happening politically at that time in Italy, or
indeed in China? Constantine may have begun Rome's march to Christianity in 312 AD, but what
great shifts in religious observance were happening in India or North Africa? In asking that
question, this book will connect up our different pasts and as a result enable us to understand the
varying speeds, and kinds, of evolution that the regions of our world have been through. It opens
up a window onto the similar and different challenges and issues we have faced, as well as the
responses and ideas we have developed as a result.
In this way ANCIENT WORLD will use four crucial dates to open up an exploration of four different
themes in global history: civilisation, politics, war and religion. It will take the reader from events in
England to China, from Peru to Babylon, and from India to North Africa. As a result, rather than
learning individual histories – national histories which are self-contained and sealed-off – the
reader will be able to connect up their knowledge of currently isolated strands of world history
and expose themselves to new ones, becoming more informed global citizens, at a time when it has
never been more important to understand the world from a global perspective.
Dr Michael Scott is Assistant Professor in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick.
His previous books include DELPHI (Princeton University Press 2014); SPACE AND SOCIETY IN THE
GREEK AND ROMAN WORLDS (Cambridge University Press 2012), FROM DEMOCRATS TO
KINGS (Icon 2009). He has written and presented successful TV series for History Channel,
National Geographic, BBC 2, BBC 4, as well as a recent global history series 'Spin the Globe' for
BBC Radio 4. He has taught in Greece, the UK, the US and Brazil.
www.michaelscottweb.com @drmichaelcscott
UK Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Hutchinson/Random House
October 2015
Spring 2016
Proposal
90,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
69
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE OPINION OF OTHERS
Tali Sharot
Lucid, engaging and cutting-edge... a must-read for anyone interested in imagining the
future
– David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of SUM and INCOGNITO, on THE
OPTIMISM BIAS
An intelligent written look into why most people take an optimistic view on life...
stimulating discussion... in easily understood language... fascinating trip into why we
prefer to remain hopeful about our future and ourselves
– New York Journal of Books on THE OPTIMISM BIAS
Most readers will turn to the last page not only buoyed by hope but also aware of the
sources and benefits of that hope
– Booklist on THE OPTIMISM BIAS
In our modern society, it is a widely accepted view that whether selecting a business strategy or a
dinner menu, the more brains contributing to making a decision the merrier. Crowd sourcing is all
the rage and none of us dare make a decision without consulting online forums. But here is the thing
– the crowd is only wise as long as the people in it are making their judgements independently,
oblivious to what the next person is thinking. But how often does that happen in reality?
We are social creatures and our default instinct is to interact. It turns out that humans become
increasingly irrational when making decisions together. Recent research by neuroscientists along
with studies by social scientists, now suggests that two, three or even one hundred interacting brains
are not always better than one, and are sometimes considerably worse.
THE OPINION OF OTHERS offers up an extraordinary and provocative insight into the false
beliefs and poor decisions generated by interacting individuals. This is not just relevant to large
groups such as financial markets and online networks; false beliefs develop and expand within
friends and families, business partners, and cultural groups. This is the untold story behind a wide
range of phenomena including psychosomatic epidemics, Yelp, religion, economic bubbles,
pseudoscience and urban legends.
So why do seemingly smart people repeatedly make bad choices when making decisions in
groups? In THE OPINION OF OTHERS Dr Tali Sharot will combine everyday examples and real
anecdotes with detailed explanations of the workings of the brain, to answer just that question.
Tali Sharot is the director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London. She is currently
a visiting Professor at Harvard Medical School. Her book THE OPTIMISM BIAS was published in
2011 by Pantheon / Random House in the US and Constable & Robinson in the UK and sold in nine
langauges. An extract from the book made the front cover of Time magazine as well as a three
page feature in the Observer. Tali was one of the presenters and experts on the prime time BBC 2
TV series The Science Club (2012), her research was the focus of a BBC Horizon programme and
she frequently appears on international radio and television programmes. Tali has given a talk at
TED’s annual conference in California and has spoken extensively at prestigious events and
festivals internationally. Tali is Israeli and is based in Boston and London.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Little, Brown
Henry Holt and Company
Spring 2015
Spring 2016
Proposal
80-90,000 words
SAL
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US
70
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE SIMPSONS AND THEIR
MATHEMATICAL SECRETS
Simon Singh
Simon Singh’s excellent book blows the lid off a decades-long conspiracy to secretly
educate cartoon viewers
– David X. Cohen, writer of The Simpsons and Futurama
This is probably the best popular account of a scientific topic I have ever read
– Irish Times on FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM
Singh’s account combines readability with a more meaty level of technical analysis than
any other I have seen. His powers of explanation are as dazzling as ever
– Guardian on THE CODE BOOK
Some have seen philosophy embedded in episodes of The Simpsons; others have detected
elements of psychology and religion. Simon Singh, bestselling author of FERMAT’S LAST
THEOREM, THE CODE BOOK and THE BIG BANG, instead makes the compelling case that
what The Simpsons’ writers are most passionate about is mathematics.
He reveals how the writers have drip-fed morsels of number theory into the series over the last
twenty-five years; indeed, there are so many mathematical references in The Simpsons, and in its
sister program, Futurama, that they could form the basis of an entire university course.
Using specific episodes as jumping off points – from ‘Bart the Genius’ to ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ –
Simon Singh brings to life the most intriguing and meaningful mathematical concepts, ranging from
pi and the paradox of infinity to the origins of numbers and the most profound outstanding
problems that haunt today’s generation of mathematicians. In the process, he introduces us to The
Simpsons’ brilliant writing team – the likes of Ken Keeler, Al Jean, Jeff Westbrook, and Stewart
Burns – who are not only comedy geniuses, but who also hold advanced degrees in mathematics.
This eye-opening book will give anyone who reads it an entirely new mathematical insight into the
most successful show in television history.
Simon Singh was born in Somerset of Punjabi descent, studied physics at Imperial College, London,
and completed a PhD in particle physics at the University of Cambridge. In 1990 he joined the
BBC’s Science Department, where he was a producer and director in programmes such as
Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. In 1996 he directed ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’, a BAFTA award
winning documentary about the world’s most notorious mathematical problem. The documentary
was also aired in America as part of the NOVA series. The Proof, as it was re-titled, was also
nominated for an Emmy. Since then, Simon has researched the history of code-breaking, writing
books and presenting a Channel 4 series about the topic. He has also become interested in
studying the effectiveness of alternative therapies, and recently teamed up with Professor Edzard
Ernst to write TRICK OR TREATMENT? : Alternative Medicine on Trial.
http://simonsingh.net/ @SLSingh
UK Publisher
US Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury
10 October 2013
272 pages
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Record), Czech Republic (Dokoran), Germany (Carl
Hanser), Greece (Travlos), Israel (Books in the Attic), Italy (Rizzoli), Japan (Shinchosa), Korea (Yoon Publishing), Spain
(Ariel), Sweden (Leopard), Turkey (Kassandra)
World English Language rights: Bloomsbury US
71
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
PATH OF BLOOD
The Story of Al Qaeda’s War on the House of Saud
Thomas Small and Jonathan Hacker
In Riyadh, July 2004, during a raid on an Al Qaeda safe-house, Saudi
Special Forces discovered hundreds of tapes and CDs. The terrorists had
been filming everything, from their training camps to their suicide
campaigns. After protracted negotiations with the Saudi government,
filmmakers Thomas Small and Jonathan Hacker became the only civilians
in the world with access to this classified archive.
What emerges is an extended guerrilla campaign to topple the House of
Saud, seize the world’s largest proven oil reserves and, having
destabilized the world’s financial markets, to establish a powerful,
fundamentalist Muslim Empire. If they had succeeded, it would have been
a global catastrophe.
This revealing footage shows some deceptively fresh-faced young men who, in between learning
how to make car bombs and shoot rifles, have wheelbarrow races and sing campfire songs. But
their camaraderie and ill discipline doesn’t lessen their threat. They were willing to kill, and to die,
for their cause.
The book will stand alone as the first to take readers inside the minds of Al Qaeda’s regional
commanders and their new recruits. It offers us a unique window on their inner workings, the
arguments and power-plays, combining THE LONGEST WAR with THE BAADER MEINHOF
COMPLEX.
Originally from California, Thomas Small caught the travel bug early in his life and spent several
years travelling the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. He is fluent in Arabic, with a firstclass degree in Arabic & Islamic Studies from SOAS, and lived in Damascus for a year. He now
lives in London where he works as a film producer and copywriter. He is Associate Producer of the
PATH OF BLOOD documentary, based on the seized footage. This is his first book. @smallthom
Jonathan Hacker is the author of TAKE TEN: Contemporary British Film Directors (OUP) and a
BAFTA-award-winning documentary film producer/director. His work covers a diverse range of
programming, from high-profile international history series to hard-hitting current affairs
programmes filmed in some of the world’s most dangerous locations. Jon is the director of the
documentary film. http://jonathanhacker.co.uk/
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Simon & Schuster
September 2014
Copyedited manuscript
130,000 words approximately
APC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Portugal (Bertrand)
72
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – Non-fiction
THE BIOGRAPHY OF FRANCIS BACON
Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swann
DE KOONING: An American Master – winner of a 2005 Pulitzer Prize in
Biography; nominated amongst the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2005;
winner of 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
Brilliant, sweeping, authoritative... The elusiveness of its subject makes the
achievement of DE KOONING: An American Master that much more dazzling... a
remarkably lucid narrative
– Janet Maslin, The New York Times on DE KOONING
A wise and delectable biography... To read [this] book is to spend hours in the
company of the most interesting of men, ever on the threshold of moments when
mere interest dissolves into hot, stammering creative bliss
– Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker on DE KOONING
Many visual artists made startling, demonic images during the course of the dark, foreboding
twentieth century but none did so with more authority than the painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992).
His paintings of the 1940s bore witness to the shattered psychology of the time and shot him to a
prominence that hardly diminished over the next fifty years. He captured sexuality, violence and
isolation in his unflinching depictions of the anxieties of the modern condition. He became the
modern master of the monstrous; an iconic figure in Western culture.
That emblematic ‘mastery’ makes Bacon a particularly important subject for a biography: his
paintings capture both the futility and the furies of post-war life. But he also became an
emblematic figure in gay history, an essential advocate of the ‘outsider’s’ perspective in Western
society. Even his celebrity, which could seem, at times, like a trashy halo, conveyed something
important about the surrounding society. in short, he represents much more than just another
painter’s idiosyncratic view of the world.
Today, the fascination with Bacon shows no sign of diminishing. Mark and Annalyn bring Bacon to
life on the page, capturing as precisely as possible the character of the man and his world. Relying
on both the work of earlier writers and their own comprehensive new research, they put this
remarkable life into a rich panorama, bringing together the personal and the emblematic sides of
Bacon.
Mark Stevens is the former art critic of New York magazine. He has also been the art critic for the
New Republic and Newsweek and has written numerous essays published in books, art magazines,
catalogues and general interest publications, including: the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New
York Times. His essays for New York magazine were among the finalists for a 2005 National
Magazine Award. A graduate of Princeton University and King’s College, Cambridge, he was,
most recently, a 2007-2008 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
Annalyn Swan is the former arts editor of Newsweek and an award-winning music critic. She
began her career at Time magazine and has written for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and
New York magazine, among others. As an independent book and magazine editor, she has worked
with many of the leading journalism organizations in the U.S., among them Time Inc., U.S. News &
World Report, and Forbes. A graduate of Princeton University, she was named a Marshall Scholar
and earned her Master’s degree at King’s College, Cambridge. She is a former trustee of
Princeton University.
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Fourth Estate/HarperCollins
Alfred A. Knopf
Autumn 2014
August 2015
100,000 words approximately
CBC
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Italy (Feltrinelli)
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PICASSO’S BRAIN
Christine Temple
As a neuropsychologist, Professor Christine Temple is fascinated by
why some people are more creative than others. Are some people
born with brains that predispose them toward creativity? Are there
specific ways in which such people think and act? Are the roots here
environmental or do their achievements lie in their DNA?
Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and created thousands of
exceptional works of art, but what was it about his brain that led to this extraordinary capacity for
sustained and diverse creativity? Could Picasso have been a creative genius because, in one
person, he had enhanced development of all the elements that are important for creativity, and
can we understand these elements?
PICASSO’S BRAIN will explore what we can understand about creativity through the prism of
genius; through the work and lives of not only Picasso, but also other artists and musicians, scientists
and writers, chess players and inventors. Intriguingly, Picasso was himself fascinated by what
enabled him to be such a creative artist – an interest shared by those of us who lack such
exceptional talents and yet would love to understand and develop the creative abilities we do
possess. There have been many recent studies in psychological science that add greatly to our
understanding. Picasso’s brain, as this book will show, was one of the most astounding examples of
the creative mind that the world has seen.
Christine Temple is Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Essex. She has degrees from
the Universities of St Andrews, UCLA and Oxford. In the USA, she worked with war veterans, and
‘split brain’ patients, given rare surgery for epilepsy. Later, she established the Developmental
Neuropsychology Unit at London University, working with children with dyslexia, autism, disorders
of language, face recognition and memory, as well as children and adults with unusual talents. At
the age of 33, she became the youngest Professor of Psychology in the UK. Most recently, she led
the Science and Engineering faculty at the University of Essex, where she was a Pro ViceChancellor for six years. She has published two previous books on neuropsychology. Her lifelong
passion for the arts inspired her fascination with the basis of creativity and the interface between
science and the arts.
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Constable & Robinson
Spring 2015
Unedited manuscript
90,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Japan (Bungeishunju), Korea (Random House Korea)
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THE WORLD OF PHOBIA
A Phenomenological Study
Dr Dylan Trigg
THE WORLD OF PFOBIA is a descriptive, first-person
examination of how our everyday experiences are affected
by anxiety and agoraphobia.
While anxiety has assumed a role in the history of philosophy –
and phenomenology in particular – until now, a sustained study
of how the mood shapes our sense of self and the world
remains largely incomplete.
In this book, Trigg asks a series of critical questions and discusses anxiety and agoraphobia in its
relationship to others, our experiences of the world, conditions, home, environments and places.
Employing a phenomenological framework, the book integrates phenomenological inquiry with
current issues in the philosophy of mind, such as theories of mind and embodiment.
The result is a renewed understanding of anxiety and its relationship with the world around us.
Dylan Trigg is a postdoctoral researcher at UCD, Dublin. He is also a visiting researcher at Les
Archives Husserl, École Normale Supérieure, Paris working on the intersection of phenomenology
and psychoanalysis. He earned his PhD at the University of Sussex. Trigg is the author of four
books: The Thing: Xenophenomenology and the Origins of Life (Zero Books, 2014), Body Parts
(3AM Press, 2012), The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Ohio University Press
2012) and The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason (Peter
Lang, 2006). Born and educated in Britain, he divides his time between Dublin and Paris.
www.dylantrigg.com @dylantrigg
UK Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Status
Length
Agent
Bloomsbury Academic
December 2014
Autumn 2015
Proposal
80,000 words approximately
CEK
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth
World English Language rights: Bloomsbury
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NIGHT SCHOOL
Wake Up to the Power of Sleep
Richard Wiseman
People are emotionally drawn to the supernatural. They actively want weird,
spooky things to be true... Wiseman shows us a higher joy as he deftly skewers
the paranormal charlatans, blows away the psychic fog and lets in the clear
light of reason
– Richard Dawkins on PARANORMALITY
Excellent! A triumph of scientifically proven advice over the myths of self-help.
Uplifting and long overdue
– Derren Brown on 59 SECONDS
Almost a third of your whole life is spent asleep. NIGHT
SCHOOL uncovers the scientific truth about the sleeping brain –
and gives powerful tips on how those hours of apparently ‘dead’
time in the dark can transform your waking life.
Based on exciting new peer-reviewed research, massparticipation experiments and the world's largest archive of
dream reports, NIGHT SCHOOL will teach you how to:
Learn information and solve problems while you sleep; find out why nightmares can be good for
you, and what your dreams really mean; unlock the creative power of the six-minute nap, banish
jet-lag, night terrors and snoring; discover the secrets of the ‘super sleepers’; and get the best
night’s sleep of your life.
Studies show that even a small lack of sleep can have a detrimental effect on our health, lifespan
and happiness. Professor Richard Wiseman’s authoritative, entertaining new book introduces the
powerful new science of sleep – and gives us back the missing third of our days.
Welcome to NIGHT SCHOOL.
Professor Richard Wiseman holds Britain’s only Professorship in the Public Understanding of
Psychology, at the University of Hertfordshire. His research into a range of topics including luck,
self-help, deception and persuasion has been published in the world’s leading academic journals,
while his psychology-based YouTube videos have received over 150 million views around the
world. He is the author of several books that have been translated into over 30 languages,
including THE LUCK FACTOR, QUIRKOLOGY, RIP IT UP and the international bestseller 59
SECONDS. http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/ @RichardWiseman
UK Publisher
UK Publication
Length
Agent
Macmillan
27 March 2014
352 pages
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, China (Beijing Booky), Czech Republic (Emitos), Germany (S.
Fischer), Israel (Book in the Attic), Italy (Adriano Salani), Japan (Bunheishunju), Korea (Mirae-N), Spain (under offer),
Taiwan (Sun Color)
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THE INVENTION OF NATURE
Andrea Wulf
Andrea Wulf’s story of the chase is an enthralling, nail-biting thriller and will
undoubtedly prove one of the non-fiction books of the year. Even if you fail to see
the Transit, don’t miss this wonderful book
– Mail on Sunday on CHASING VENUS
A fine example of scientific storytelling narrated with elegant expertise
– The Times on CHASING VENUS
Truly excellent... rip-roaring tales of the numerous expeditions that set off around
the globe to observe the Venusian transit of 1761... communicate[s] the verve
and energy – not to mention the perilous nature – of the expeditions
– New Scientist on CHASING VENUS
Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) was one of the most intriguing men of his age. Dashingly
handsome and brazenly adventurous, he revolutionised the way we see the natural world. He was
the first person to view nature as a unified whole in which everything is interconnected: what we
term today the ‘web of life’. Charles Darwin said that he would have not boarded the Beagle, and
conceived of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES without Humboldt. ‘My whole course of life is due to having
read & reread as a Youth his Personal Narrative’, Darwin wrote.
Humboldt conceived a concept of nature that was not just made of landscapes, oceans, mountains,
plants, rocks, animals and the heavens but also one that had social, political, aesthetic and
economic dimensions. He looked at nature as a global force and then projected the lessons that he
had learned towards the future. Reading Humboldt today reveals him as a visionary. He was the
first to predict human-induced climate change, and his critical assessment of colonialism and of
social injustice as destructive force upon the environment remain prophetically topical. His
approach has become fundamental to our concerns.
THE INVENTION OF NATURE is a quest to rediscover Humboldt and to restore his place in the
pantheon of writing about nature and the natural sciences. It is also a quest to show why we think
about nature as we do today. Described by his contemporaries as the most famous man in the
world after Napoleon, Humboldt had an enormous influence on some of the greatest thinkers,
writers and scientists of his day.
Andrea Wulf trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. Her first book, THIS OTHER
EDEN: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History, co-authored with Emma GiebenGamel, was published by Little, Brown in 2005. Her next three books, THE BROTHER GARDENERS,
THE FOUNDING GARDENERS and CHASING VENUS, were published by William Heinemann in
2008, 2011 and 2012, respectively. http://www.andreawulf.com/ @andrea_wulf
UK Publisher
US Publisher
Delivery
UK Publication
Length
Agent
John Murray
Alfred A. Knopf
August 2014
Autumn 2015
90,000 words approximately
PEW
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Germany (C. Bertelsmann), Portugal (Temas E Debates)
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Spring 2014 Rights Guide
WORLD RIGHTS
Conville & Walsh is also proud to represent a distinguished list of titles in which world rights have
been sold.
Please find further details in the following pages.
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Conville & Walsh Ltd. – World Rights
THE SHARK AND THE ALBATROSS
Travels with a Camera to the Ends of the Earth
John Aitchinson
For twenty years I have had a dream job – travelling the world to film wildlife for the BBC and other
broadcasters. This has taken me to some of the most remote spots on every continent, in search of lions
and tigers, sharks and albatrosses. This is the story of some of those journeys, from my first days as a
fledgling cameraman, to discover the deep connections we all have with the natural world, wherever
we live.
John Aitchison is a wildlife filmmaker. He has worked on many programmes for the BBC, National
Geographic and Discovery Channel including Frozen Planet, Life, Big Cat Diary, The Natural
World, Springwatch and Yellowstone. He also did camera work on a programme he produced,
The Amber Time Machine, which features David Attenborough’s quest to discover what amber can
tell us about the past. John is a double BAFTA and Emmy winner for his work both as a nature
documentary producer and cameraman.
Non-fiction. World rights: Profile. UK Publication: Summer 2015. Agent: APC
CONCRETE CANVAS
The Global Street Art Project
Lee Bofkin
CONCRETE CANVAS is the first book from the Global Street Art project, an online archive that
aims to catalogue what’s happening in street art today. The book features work by 300 incredible
artists from around the world. Along with beautiful photos, the book discusses how the curation of
public space is affecting our cities and why this will be more important in the future. In addition,
Global Street Art photographer and co-founder Lee Bofkin shares some of his best travel stories,
featuring big guns, massive dogs and lots of abandoned buildings.
Lee Bofkin was a former UK-team break-dancer and founding member of Soul Mavericks crew
(UK’s top b-boy crew) and has travelled the world taking more than 60,000 street art photos and
built the Global Street Art archive, a project he co-founded in 2012. Since its foundation, the
Global Street Art has growing fan base of 150,000 social media followers and has organised
more than 500 legal pieces of street art in London with their pioneering Walls Project. They have
worked with Xbox, Nokia, Samsung, HP and many other brands. Bofkin did his undergraduate in
biology at Oxford and PhD in Mathematics and Evolution in Cambridge and now lives in London,
but still continues to travel the global in search of new Street Art.
Non-fiction. World rights: Octopus/Hachette. UK Publication: Autumn 2014. Agent: CEK
NOVEL INTERIORS
Living in Enchanted Rooms Inspired by Literature
Lisa Borgnes Giramonti
We don’t just read a great story, we inhabit it. But it doesn’t have to end there: what’s stopping us
from incorporating the gracious details and traditions from our favourite novels into our own
homes? From decorating and entertaining to spending time more simply and meaningfully,
literature is a rich repository of ideas that make up what writer/decorator/artist Lisa Borgnes
Giramonti calls a ‘well-read’ life. This book is a way to discover your design style through the
literary worlds you love. Filled with luscious photography and easy-style-tips, you can create your
own Gatsby moment, Austen comfort or some Wilde entertainment to fill your home with literature.
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Conville & Walsh Ltd. – World Rights
Lisa Borgnes Giramonti founded the blog ‘A Bloomsbury Life’ which has been featured in many
design magazines and national magazines. She is a contributing editor to Hyland magazine, an
essayist for Martha Stewart magazine and has written for W magazine as a style arbiter. She
lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son and can be spotted throughout the US lecture circuit,
getting people excited about how they can examine novels as a source of inspiration to lead a
more stylist, gracious life.
Non-fiction. World rights: Potter Style/Random House. US Publication: Autumn 2014. Agent: CEK
THE HONOURS
Tim Clare
It’s 1935 and war is looming. Alderberen Hall is a sprawling country estate shadowed by suspicion
and paranoia. Thirteen-year-old Delphine Venner is determined to uncover the secrets of the elite
society that has taken in her mother and unstable father. As she explores the house, and discovers
the dark network of hidden tunnels and secret passages that thread the hall and its grounds, she
must use all her stubborn resourcefulness to uncover more about the unknown dangers that lurk.
With the help of head gamekeeper Henry Garforth, a sawn off shotgun and a satchel full of
homemade grenades, Delphine throws herself into a terrifying and deadly mission. She must learn
the bloody lessons of war from old soldiers in time to battle the deadly forces that emerge from
the black water. Delphine thinks she can tell man from monster but she will discover that, in war,
one can become the other in an instant.
Tim Clare is well known as a performance poet in the UK and has performed nationwide, including
at the Edinburgh Fringe and at countless festivals. His 2005 memoir, WE CAN’T ALL BE
ASTRONAUTS, won the best memoir/biography at the East Anglian book awards. Tim also
presented a 2005 Channel 4 series How to Get a Book Deal. THE HONOURS is his debut novel.
www.timclarepoet.co.uk @TimClarePoet
Fiction. World rights: Canongate. UK publication: Spring 2015. Agent: SAL
POOR NO MORE
How America Can End the War on Poverty
Peter Cove
In POOR NO MORE: How America Can End the War on Poverty, Peter Cove will recount his five
decades fighting the war against poverty in America. He will trace poverty’s harsh history and
look back at where we went wrong. Cove ends the book with a solution, backed by experience
and data that will surely instigate headlines and wide media coverage. To end poverty, Cove
argues, America must end welfare and failed poverty programs. Work is the only solution to
poverty. And in POOR NO MORE, Cove details how America can make this happen.
Peter Cove is a social activist and businessman and one of America’s leading advocates for private
solutions to welfare dependency. As founder of America Works in 1984 and the Work First
Foundation, Cove has received numerous awards and citations, including awards for public policy
innovation from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and from the Ford Foundation. He
frequently writes policy papers and opinion columns and has appeared on The Colbert Report and
The Brian Lehrer Show. Cove, along with his wife, Dr. Lee Bowes, live in New York City.
Non-fiction. World rights: Basic Books. US Publication: January 2015. Agent: CEK
REASONS TO STAY ALIVE
Matt Haig
When he was twenty-four Matt Haig nearly killed himself. He was later diagnosed with panic
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disorder, and eventually recovered. In this book the author explores the nature of his mental illness,
and discusses depression and anxiety in general. Full of lists, autobiographical anecdotes, and
actual advice, conversations between the author and his younger self, short contributions from fifty
of Matt's readers, this book is not your average self-help book.
Matt Haig is the author of novels for both adults and children. His adult novels include the
bestsellers THE LAST FAMILY IN ENGLAND, the film rights of which were sold to Brad Pitt, and THE
RADLEYS, which was a TV Book Club ‘Best Read’. His latest adult novel, THE HUMANS, has been
chosen as a 2014 World Book Night title. The Guardian summed up his writing as ‘delightfully
weird’ and The New York Times called him ‘a writer of great talent’. His works have been
translated into over 30 languages. He was recently Booktrust’s Writer in Residence and has over
40,000 followers on Twitter. http://www.matthaig.com/ @matthaig1
Non-fiction. World rights: Canongate. UK Publication: April 2015. Agent: CBC
THE A TO Z OF THE HUMAN RACE
Matt Haig
An alien comes to Earth in human form and attempts to explain the humans to his home planet. So,
adopting the human notion of lexicography, the alien defines everything from adultery to zoos.
Along the way we get definitions of apps (‘Boredom avoidance tool with opposite long-term
effect’), critics (‘A person who has noticed the lack of jobs for hangmen and witchfinders, so has
sought more available employment’) and history (‘On Earth history is not viewed as a sub-division
of mathematics, which of course it is. You will discover that history, like news, is a narrow subject –
in this case referring to the story of 0.0000001 per cent of dead male humans.’)
Between the definitions there are also a variety of travel tips, making this an essential purchase for
the first-time Earth visitor.
Fiction – E-book. World rights: Canongate. UK Publication: E-book only, April 2014. Agent: CBC
CITY OF LIES
Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran
Ramita Navai
Far removed from the picture of Tehran we glimpse in news stories, there is another, hidden city,
where survival depends on an intricate network of lies and falsehoods. It is a place where mullahs
visit prostitutes, cosmetic surgeons restore girls’ virginity and homemade porn is bought and sold in
the bazaars. It is also the home of our eight protagonists, drawn from across the spectrum of
Iranian society: the porn star, the ageing socialite, the assassin and enemy of the state who ends up
working for the Republic, the volunteer religious militiaman who undergoes a sex change, the
dutiful houseful who files for divorce, and the old-time thug running a gambling den.
These are ordinary people forced to live extraordinary lives. Plotted around the city’s pulsing
central thoroughfare, Vali Asr Street, CITY OF LIES is an energetic, intimate and unforgettable
portrait of modern Tehran and of what it is to live, love and survive under one of the world’s most
brutally repressive regimes.
Ramita Navai is a British-Iranian journalist and reporter for Channel 4’s foreign affairs series,
Unreported World. She was awarded an Emmy for her undercover report from Syria. She has also
worked as a journalist for the United Nations in Pakistan, northern Iraq and Iran and was the
Tehran correspondent for The Times from 2003 to 2006. CITY OF LIES was awarded the Royal
Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for work in progress.
Non-fiction. World rights (excl. US): Weidenfeld & Nicolson. US rights: Public Affairs.
UK Publication: May 2014. Agent: SAL
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THE ADVENTURES OF LOVELACE AND BABBAGE
Sydney Padua
Based on the cult webcomic ‘2D Goggles’, THE ADVENTURES OF LOVELACE AND BABBAGE is a
thrilling and fantastical adventure which re-imagines Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron,
mathematician and the world’s first computer programmer, and Charles Babbage, father of the
modern computer, as a crime-fighting duo.
Sydney Padua is a graphic novelist and animator. As a visual effects artist she works in both handdrawn and computer-generated animation in films such as ‘The Iron Giant’, ‘Clash of the Titans’,
Chaumet’s ‘The Illusionist’, and ‘John Carter’. She began drawing her cult webcomic The Thrilling
Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by accident and is still trying to figure out how to stop; it
has been featured on the BBC’s Techlab, The Economist online, The Times, and Wired UK. She is
Canadian and lives in London. http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/
Fiction – graphic novel. World rights: Knopf. US Publication: Autumn 2015. Agent: CBC
WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN
Thatcherism and the Cultural Decline of Political Pop
Daniel Rachel
From Daniel Rachel, author of ISLE OF NOISES: Conversations with Great British Songwriters; a
NME and Guardian best book of the year, comes a book that will chronicle one of the greatest,
yet unknown, marriages between pop and politics in British musical history; the Red Wedge
movement. The combination of personal insights and collective contribution will provide a unique
historical document of a polemic age. It will be the definitive word on popular cultures last stand
against the Establishment, from the mid-Seventies to the late Eighties, as told by the musicians,
politicians and activists directly involved.
Daniel Rachel was born in Solihull living opposite Ian Botham’s grandmother. Leaving Birmingham
at eighteen, Daniel studied film and theatre at Winchester University before dropping out to form
a band. After years of touring in bands as well as a successful career as a solo artist, Daniel has
turned his attention from song composition to writing. His first book, ISLE OF NOISES: Conversations
with Great British Songwriters, was published by Picador in September 2013.
Non-fiction. World rights: Picador/Macmillan. UK Publication: January 2015. Agent: CEK
SKINHEADS: 1979-1984
Derek Ridgers
Acclaimed photographer Derek Ridgers captures a five-year period of skinhead culture in London,
from 1979 to 1984. These photos are as startling as they are provocative, moving as they are
intimate; shedding a new light on a subculture many of us have never seen this up-close before.
Derek Ridgers is an English photographer with a career spanning over thirty years. He is best
known for his photography of music, film and club/street culture. In February 2012, the Sunday
Times Magazine included Derek Ridgers’ portrait of Keith Richards at its 50th anniversary exhibit
at the Saatchi Gallery. His work has been shown at the ICA, Photographers’ Gallery, Proud and
the National Portrait Gallery.
Non-fiction. World rights: Omnibus Press. UK Publication: Summer 2014. Agent: CEK
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CRASHING HEAVEN
Al Robertson
With Earth abandoned, humanity resides on Station, an industrialised asteroid run by the sentient
corporations of the Pantheon. Under their leadership a war has been raging against the Totality –
ex-Pantheon A.I.s gone rogue. With the war over, Jack Forster and his sidekick Hugo Fist, a virtual
puppet tied to Jack’s mind and created to destroy the Totality, have returned home. Labelled a
traitor for surrendering to the Totality, all Jack wants is to clear his name but when he discovers
two old friends have died under suspicious circumstances he also wants answers. Soon he and Fist
are embroiled in a conspiracy that threatens not only their future but all of humanity’s. But with
Fist’s software licence about to expire, taking Jack’s life with it, can they bring down the real
traitors before their time runs out?
Al Robertson is a Creative Consultant on branding. His work has been shortlisted for the BSFA
Short Story Award and longlisted for the British Fantasy Awards. He lives in London with his wife
and son. CRASHING HEAVEN is his first novel and the first in an intended series; Al is currently
writing book two, WAKING HELL.
Fiction. World rights: Gollancz/Orion. UK Publication: Spring 2015. Agent: SMA
WEAK MESSAGES CREATE BAD SITUATIONS
A Manifesto
David Shrigley
A personal message from the author:
We are in a bad situation and weak messages are to blame. Lots of individuals in society today
are FEEBLE-MINDED. They don’t know what the HELL is going on. Unfortunately many of these
people are responsible for running THE COUNTRY. They don’t know the difference between a
PRECIOUS JEWEL and piece of animal turd. Their ideas are MEANINGLESS, illustrated using
RUBBISH imagery (often made by a computer). The stupid words they write are always in BAD
FONTS. Yet still people HEED this nonsense. Maybe YOU are one of these people? It’s alright. I am
here to HELP you. I have a FULLY-COMPOSED WORLD VIEW. I have STRONG opinions about
EVERYTHING. And my ideas are HAND-ILLUSTRATED and use REAL HANDWRITING that you can
trust. I know exactly what’s going on and am WILLING to share my thoughts with you. If you LISTEN
to what I say then things will quickly improve. No more weak messages. No more bad situations.
David Shrigley has lived and worked in Glasgow since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in
1991. His work encompasses drawing, photography and sculpture and has been shown
internationally, including solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and
Zurich. His work was featured weekly in The Guardian from 2005 to 2009 and he has had a
number of books of his work published, most recently the retrospective WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU
DOING?: The Essential David Shrigley.
Non-fiction. World rights: Canongate. UK Publication: November 2014. Agent: PEW
THE DIVERSITY DIET
Tim Spector
At a time when an increasing proportion of the world’s population is suffering from obesity and its
related, and often fatal, health issues, Tim Spector offers up a fresh and fascinating perspective.
Tim puts forward the persuasive argument that because of the way in which our attitudes to food
have changed over the last few decades, we are no longer exposed to or play host to the very
microbes that have always been an invisible but essential part of our physiology. In THE DIVERSITY
DIET Tim dispels various myths and offers up a compelling account of our physiological relationship
with food. The marketplace is flooded with books promoting faddish diets and while Tim is careful
not to completely rubbish these, he does underline why we should feel suspicious of their long83
Conville & Walsh Ltd. – World Rights
lasting effects as well as the pseudo-science that lies behind much of the dietary advice that we
are given.
Tim Spector is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London and Honorary
Consultant Physician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals. He set up the Twins register in 1993, the
largest of its kind in the world, which he continues to direct. He is the recipient of several academic
awards and has published over 500 research papers. He has appeared in several television
documentaries and is frequently consulted across the media. IDENTICALLY DIFFERENT was
published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2012 to widespread critical acclaim.
Non-fiction. World rights: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. UK Publication: Spring 2015. Agent: SAL
BUDDHA’S DAUGHTERS
A Journey into the Heart of the Nuns of Nirvana
Christine Toomey
Amongst the world's community of more than half a billion Buddhists, the possibility that their next
revered spiritual leaders could one day, soon, be possible. It has taken the nuns of the Buddhist
faith more than two and a half millennia, but their time is finally coming. BUDDHA’S DAUGHTERS is
the story of the women who know how hard it has been for such an enlightened position to be
reached. It is the story of women, young and old, who choose to become Buddhist nuns. Part oral
history, part travelogue, part personal reflection on what it means to live a nun’s life, BUDDHA’S
DAUGHTERS will open the door on a previously secret world that has something to say to us all.
Christine Toomey has been a foreign correspondent and feature writer for The Sunday Times for
more than twenty years. Educated at Oxford University and speaking five languages, Christine’s
work has been short-listed for various awards, twice winning Amnesty International’s Magazine
Story of the Year in 2002 and 2006. Previously based as a correspondent in Mexico City, Miami,
Paris and Berlin, Christine now lives in London with her daughter Ines, escaping when possible to the
long abandoned hill-top home she spent years renovating in Le Marche, Italy.
Non-fiction. World rights: Portobello/Granta. UK Publication: Spring 2015. Agent: CEK
THE HUNGER
Lincoln Townley
Hidden from London’s tourists lies a demi-monde of decadence and this is where Lincoln worked for
a famous men’s club, connecting wealthy punters with hopeful girls. He worked his way through an
endless supply of women, breaking beds and smashing toilets along the way. But even that was not
enough to satisfy The Hunger. Driven to drink more, snort more, fight more and f*ck more, Lincoln
pushed his body to the point of collapse and then he pushed it further. When you’re possessed by
The Hunger, is there ever a way out? This raw, brutal and honest account of one man’s addiction to
excess is a take of terrifying madness.
Lincoln Townley is a well-known entertainment entrepreneur, famed for his legendary parties for
the rich and famous. He is married to actress Denise Welch.
Non-fiction. World rights: Simon & Schuster. UK Publication: May 2014. Agent: CEK
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Conville & Walsh Ltd. – World Rights
THE LIAR’S CHAIR
Rebecca Whitney
To the outside world, Rachel Teller and her husband David appear happy, prosperous and
fulfilled. The big house, the successful business – they seem to have it all. However, it is control, not
love, that fuels their relationship and, to add to the dysfunction of their marriage, David has no
idea his wife indulges in regular drunken indiscretions (with his coke dealer, no less). When Rachel
kills a man in a hit and run, the meticulously maintained veneer over their perfect life finally begins
to crack. Covering up all evidence of the accident, David insists they continue as normal. Rachel
though is racked with guilt and as her behaviour becomes increasingly self-destructive she not only
inflames David’s darker side, but also uncovers her own long-suppressed memories of shame.
This is an intelligent, dark and pacy psychological thriller about a woman in the mire, in search of
atonement, and a sociopathic husband who has no intention of allowing her to find it.
Following a BA in Creative Arts from Nottingham Trent University, Rebecca Whitney worked in film
and television production for many years. More recently she completed the Certificate in Creative
Writing at Sussex University, and began work on her first novel THE LIAR'S CHAIR. She lives in
Brighton with her husband and two children.
Fiction. World rights: Mantle/Macmillan. UK Publication: Spring 2015. Agent: SMA
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