Sunday, April 06, 2014

Hutchinson pre-empts on Australian debut novel

04.04.14 | Sarah Shaffi - The Bookseller

Hutchinson has bought a debut Australian novel in a “significant” pre-London Book Fair pre-empt.
Senior editor Sarah Rigby acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada and Australia New Zealand, to Lost & Found by bookseller Brooke Davis [pictured] from Sharon Galant and Benython Oldfield at the Zeitgeist Media Group.
The book has also been pre-empted in Canada, Italy and Germany, and sold at auction in France, with offers also coming in from Holland and Slovakia.

 Lost & Found follows three characters – Millie Bird, 82-year-old Agatha Pantha and 87-year-old Karl the Touch Typist.
At the age of seven, Millie realises everything around her is dying. Agatha has not left her house since her husband died, and sits behind her front curtains, shouting at passers-by until she “spies a young girl across the street”. Karl, who used to type love letters on his wife’s skin and now types in the air to remember her, escapes the nursing home his son leaves him in.

 The book’s description reads: “Millie, Agatha and Karl: three lost people looking into the future and needing to be found. But, as they will soon discover, it’s never too late to change your story.”

 Rigby said: “A novel that opens with a little girl sitting in a department store beneath the Ginormous Women’s Underwear rack was always going to be a winner with me, but at Hutchinson we have all fallen in love with Millie, Karl and Agatha and this wonderful story of their adventures together. Lost & Found is glorious: funny, moving, heart-wrenching, heart-warming, wildly inventive – full of characters that readers will cry with; laugh with; root for.”

 Davis is a bookseller in Perth and wrote Lost & Found over five years as part of a PhD on writing about grief. During that time she won the 2011 Postgraduate Queensland Writing Prize with an extract from the novel titled Karl the Touch Typist.
Hutchinson will publish Lost and Found in hardback in January 2015, with a Windmill paperback in May 2015.
The novel will be published by Hachette Australia in July 2014, with editions in other countries publishing in 2015.
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