serpent's tail rights guide 2014

Serpent’s Tail Rights Guide

London 2014

3a Exmouth House, Pine Street, London, ec1r 0jh www.profilebooks.com

1

Alex Christofi is a literary agent with Conville & Walsh. Glass is his debut novel.

February 2015£11.99

Demy PbO288pp

ISBN 978 1 84668 967 3

Manuscript available All rights available

FICTIONGlassAlex Christofi

A modern Candide meets Huckleberry Finn with added window cleaning – Glass is a charming, off-beat comedy about a young man finding his way in the world

Glass is pure. Glass is transparent. Glass is sharp. Günter Glass, ex-milkman and aspiring window-cleaner, is pure. And he’s pretty transparent. But the jury’s still out on how sharp he is.

What naïve young Günter does have is a head for heights and an unusual fixation with glass. When a minor adventure up the spire of Salisbury Cathedral makes Günter a local celebrity, John Blades – window-cleaner to the stars – comes calling. He wants Günter to join him in London to clean Europe’s tallest glass phallus, the newly constructed Shard in London Bridge.

Günter takes Blades up on his offer and soon finds himself, for the first time, among the bright lights of London. Exploring with increasing bemusement the world around him, Günter has his first experience of love with short-range psychic Lieve Toureau, avoids Blades and his dark mutterings about fascism and false-flag terrorism, and cohabits a Hackney ‘bachelor-pad’ with a reclusive landlord. But above all, Günter spends his time trying to figure out how to be good and follow his late mother’s advice as best he can.

Will Günter find his way along the straight and narrow? Or will his innocence put him on collision course with the frequently baffling modern world?

2

July 2014£11.99Demy PbO288ppISBN 978 1 84668 983 3

Manuscript available All rights available

CRIME FICTIONThe Sun is GodAdrian McKinty

It is 1906 and Will Prior is in self-imposed exile on a remote South Pacific island, working a small, and failing, plantation. He should never have told anyone about his previous existence as a military foot policeman in the Boer War, but a man needs friends, even if they are as stuffy and, well, German, as Hauptmann Kessler, the local government representative.

So it is that Kessler approaches Will one hot afternoon, with a request for his help with a problem on a neighbouring island, inhabited by a reclusive, cultish group of European ‘cocovores’, who believe that sun worship and eating only coconuts will bring them eternal life. Unfortunately, one of their number has died in suspicious circumstances, and Kessler has been tasked with uncovering the real reason for his demise. So along with a ‘lady traveller’, Bessie Pullen-Burry, who is foisted on them by the archipelago’s eccentric owner, they travel to the island of Kabakon, to find out what is really going on.

ADRIAN McKINTY

Winner of the Spinetingler Award 2013

Shortlisted for the Australian Crime Writers Ned Kelly Award 2013

Shortlisted for le prix du meilleur polar 2013

‘Duffy is one of the most interesting, convincing and sympathetic police officers in recent crime fiction … McKinty gets better and better’ The Times

‘McKinty is reliably brilliant.’ Daily Mail

‘Adrian McKinty is a writer of substance’ Guardian

‘McKinty is seriously brilliant, his flair for language matched by his remarkable feel for place, appetite for redemptive violence and gravely cool appreciation of characters who reject conformity. There are echoes of Dennis Lehane, Joseph Wambaugh, Eoin McNamee and even Raymond Chandler but McKinty is resolutely his own hard man.’ Weekend Australian

Adrian McKinty grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland and has lived and worked in Harlem, New York and Denver, Colorado. His debut Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, while Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award and was longlisted for the 2011 Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year. In 2009 Adrian moved to Melbourne, Australia with his wife and two children.

3

Belfast, 1985. Gunrunners on the borders, riots in the cities, The Power of Love on the radio. And somehow, in the middle, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy is hanging on, a catholic policeman in the hostile Northern Irish police force.

Duffy is initially left cold by the murder of a wealthy couple, shot dead while watching TV. And when their troubled son commits suicide, leaving a note that appears to take responsibility for the deaths, it seems the case is closed. But something doesn’t add up, and soon Duffy is on the trail of a mystery that will pit him against shadowy US intelligence forces, and take him into the white-hot heart of the biggest political scandal of the decade.

January 2015£12.99320pp

Royal PbOISBN 978 1 84668 981 9

CRIME FICTIONGun Street GirlSean Duffy Book 4 Adrian McKinty

Sean Duffy Book 1‘A masterpiece of crime fiction’ Irish Times

January 2012£12.99Royal PbO352ppISBN 978 1 84668 822 5

Rights sold: Seventh Street, USA; Suhrkamp, Germany; Stock, France; Alianza, Spain.

TV/Film rights optioned by Great Meadow Productions

Sean Duffy Book 3‘Duffy’s third outing easily his best so far’ The Times

January 2014£12.99Royal PbO256ppISBN 978 1 84668 820 1

Rights sold: Seventh Street, USA; Stock, France; Suhrkamp, Germany

Sean Duffy Book 2‘It blew my doors off’ – Ian Rankin

January 2013£12.99Royal PbO256pp978 1 84668 818 8

Rights sold: Seventh Street, USA; Suhrkamp, Germany; Stock, France; Aliaza, Spain

4

Zoe Pilger writes about contemporary art and culture for the Independent, The New York Times and other publications. She is working on a PhD on romantic love and sado-masochism in the work of contemporary female artists at Goldsmiths College, London. She lives in London. Eat My Heart Out is her first novel.

Meet 2014’s most outrageous, funny and shocking anti-heroine: Ann-Marie

She’s twenty-three, her life has collapsed and she’s blaming everyone but herself. Heartbroken, skint and furious, she’s convinced that love – sweet love! – is the answer to all her problems, until she meets legendary second-wave feminist Stephanie Haight, a woman who could be her saviour – or her final undoing. From neo-burlesque pop-up strip clubs to ironic Little Mermaid-themed warehouse parties via ritual worship ceremonies summoning ancient power goddesses, disastrous one-night stands with extravagantly unsuitable men, naked cleaning jobs, a forced appearance on Women’s Hour and baby-boomer house parties in Islington, Ann-Marie hurtles through London and life, urged on by Stephanie, who is convinced that if she can save Ann-Marie she’ll rescue a whole generation from the curse of ironic detachment.

‘Like a foul-mouthed Nancy Mitford for the Gawker generation, Pilger brings a ruthlessly sharp eye to our muddled and indulgent times. Eat My Heart Out is viciously, violently funny, and marks the arrival of a fearsome new voice in British fiction.’ Sam Byers, author of Idiopathy

‘A roaring page-turner and ferociously dark satire … Not since Martin Amis’s early work can I remember a novel so exhilarated – and made so exhilarating – by its own sense of disgust.’ Daily Mail

‘Hooray for Zoe Pilger: her debut novel is about the London we know and love and it is dead smart and gloriously, mercifully, snort-out-loud hilarious … Eat my Heart Out is the hipster Bridget Jones’ Diary it’s okay to like. Only it’s a lot, lot better than that.’ Dazed and Confused

‘Already being compared to Lena Dunham, Zoe Pilger explores one woman’s mission to save a generation from ironic detachment.’ Harper’s Bazaar

Observer ‘New Faces, Fresh Fiction’ pick

‘Super-smart, funny and as dark as midnight.’ Marie-Claire

January 2014£11.99Demy PbO304ppISBN 978 1 78125 134 8

Rights sold: The Feminist Press, USA

FICTIONEat My Heart OutZoe Pilger

5

She and He are the pseudonyms of a couple who first met at university and then lost touch. When they met again – having both been married to other people – they recognised a streak of independence and freedom from convention which led, eventually, to the Mistress Contract. The contract has now been in force for over thirty years. She and He live in separate houses in the same city on the coast of America.

by She and He

A Memoir

THE M ISTRESS CONTRACT

November 2013£9.99

A HB160pp

ISBN 978 1 84668 943 7

Published in the US by Unbridled Books

Rights sold: Podium, Holland

Film rights via Knight Hall Agency

Stage rights sold to London’s Royal Court

MEMOIRThe Mistress ContractShe and He

Now a major theatrical production at London’s Royal Court, with a script by The Iron Lady’s Abi Morgan

Love, like everything else, comes with a price. What’s yours?

Based on intimate conversations recorded during the early years of their affair, The Mistress Contract is the story of a contract signed four decades ago between an anonymous couple (attributed in the book simply as She and He). The contract that She – a highly educated, divorced woman with a successful career, three children and a history of involvement with the feminist movement – asked her lover to sign proposed the following terms: He would provide her with a home and an income, while She would provide ‘Mistress Services’ – ‘All sexual acts as requested, with suspension of historical, emotional, psychological disclaimers’. He agreed to her terms, and they found a kind of happiness that more traditional forms of commitment had never provided. They talked endlessly about why this was, and then began to tape their conversations.

Provocative, unapologetic and inspiring, The Mistress Contract shines an unflinching and utterly compelling light on relations between the sexes.

*

‘A tantalising, no-holds-barred insight into the differences between the sexes.’ Observer

‘Endearing , with a playful bathos … A conversation between two people who can keep up with each other is beautiful in itself; it is like watching running deer.’ Daily Telegraph

‘We are eavesdropping on someone else’s well-read, well-groomed shorthand … He is insightful about men and She is insightful about women, they tell unvarnished truth about the way they would like the other to behave, and they deeply respect each other’s minds. “We are two different sexes, we are meant to be mismatched,” She says. This is a truth about men and women seldom acknowledged in literature: that we can, do, and should form alliances with the other team, even if we will never truly know what it is they want, or how to give it to them, or if that was even what we wanted anyway.’ Belle de Jour (Brooke Magnati)

‘A delightful document written by two wonderfully candid (anonymous) souls.’ Financial Times Book of the Year

6

Sam Hawken is a native of Texas, now living on the east coast of the United States. A graduate of the University of Maryland, he pursued a career as a historian before turning to writing.

MissingSam Hawken

September 2014£7.99B Pb0388ppISBN 978 1 84668 942 0

All rights available Rights available via Svetlana Pironko at the Author Rights Agency

Ex-Marine Jack Searle is working as a Texas building contractor, raising his two stepdaughters alone. Gonzalo Soler is a cop on the other side of the border in the town of Nuevo Laredo, struggling against the rising tide of narcos and gang crime. Two good men, trying to do their best. And their worlds collide when Jack’s daughter, Marina, goes to a concert with her Mexican cousin and disappears without trace.

In the silence that follows, Jack and Gonzalo must work together to find the missing girls. Their desperate search takes them into dive bars, strip clubs and Nuevo Laredo’s shadowy red-light district, la Zona, where they must contend with corrupt police and the deadly narcos who control them.

‘Hawken trades in gritty reality’ Irish Times

‘Hawken writes with maturity and achieves both great crime novels and work that transcends the genre’ Dave Zeltserman, author of Julius Katz

CRIME FICTION

Tequila SunsetSam HawkenLonglisted for the CWA Gold Dagger 2013

On the streets of El Paso, a police officer and an informer battle for survival against a terrifying gang, Los Aztecas.

November 2012 £11.99 Demy PbO 352pp ISBN 978 1 84668 853 9Rights sold: Belfond, France; Tunel Kitop Yayin, TurkeyRights available via Svetlana Pironko at Author Rights Agency

The Dead Women of JuárezSam Hawken

A woman’s disappearance throws two men into a tense pursuit of the truth about the female victims of Mexico’s border wars.

Rights sold: Belfond, France; Klett Cotta, Germany. November 2011 £7.99 B Pb 320pp ISBN 978 1 84668 774 7

7

Royal HB£20

448ppISBN 978 1 84668 759 4

All rights available

BIOGRAPHYDifferent Every TimeThe Authorised Biography of Robert WyattMarcus O’Dair

Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with Pink Floyd and toured America with Jimi Hendrix. He brought a Bohemian and jazz outlook to the 60s rock scene, having honed his drumming skills in a shed at the end of Robert Graves’ garden in Mallorca.

His life took an abrupt turn after he fell from a fourth-floor window at a party and was paralysed from the waist down. He reinvented himself as a singer and composer with the extraordinary album Rock Bottom that has brought him a loyal following not just in Britain but in France, Italy and Germany.

Today, Wyatt remains perennially hip, guesting with artists such as Bjork, Brian Eno, Scritti Politti, David Gilmour and Hot Chip. Marcus O’Dair has talked to all of them, indeed to just about everyone who has shaped, or been shaped by, Wyatt over five decades of music history.

Marcus O’Dair is a writer, lecturer and musician. He writes on music for the Financial Times, Independent and Guardian, and broadcasts with BBC Radio 3 and BBC 6 Music.

May 2014£15.99

Demy Hb0320pp

ISBN 978 1 84668 910 9


Ever since young men and women first gathered on vicarage lawns to play tennis, this most Victorian of games has always had a peculiarly passionate undercurrent. Whether it’s Roger Federer’s fervent fans or Woody Allen meeting Diane Keaton courtside in Annie Hall, there’s romantic potential everywhere you look. And, of course, love even makes it into the scoring system.

Taking in all the great players, trendsetters and forgotten heroes, leading academic and lifelong tennis fan Elizabeth Wilson charts the history of tennis against the parallel march of modernity, globalisation, commercialisation and gender equality across the twentieth century. So whether your idol is René Lacoste, Martina Navratilova or Andy Murray, Love Game is the essential account of the rise of the world’s most glamorous sport.

Elizabeth Wilson is currently Visiting Professor at the London College of Fashion. She is the author of several non-fiction books, and her novels The Twilight Hour, War Damage and The Girl in Berlin are also published by Serpent’s Tail.

HISTORY/SPORTLove GameA History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global PhenomenonElizabeth Wilson

8

N Quentin Woolf is a novelist and broadcaster. He read English Literature, specialising in Creative Writing, at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Journalism at the Morris College of Journalism. His short stories have appeared in publications internationally and online, in exhibitions and as part of stage performances. He has hosted Writers’ Mutual, a popular collaborative critique group for writers, for a number of years; he also runs The Writers’ Lab in East London. He is the founder of The Brick Lane Book Group. Having formerly presented The Arts Show for radio, N. Quentin Woolf is now the anchor of Londonist Out Loud, a weekly podcast focusing on news, arts and history in the capital. He has also appeared on BBC Radio 4. The Death of the Poet is his debut novel.

‘It was still bright enough in San Fran for shades, but the cotton wool up my nose needed explanation. Everyone from my barber to the kids in the neighbourhood tried to winkle out what I’d done finally to earn a punch (yeah: they all assumed I’d been hit. It wasn’t whether, but who). My busted nose even got twenty-seven words on page fourteen of the Bay Chronicle, from whose offices a dyspeptic hack called me, in the afternoon.

“You got in a fight in a bar over Noam Chomsky?” she repeated back to me, sceptically. “You filing against them?”

I said, “Do you know how long I’ve wanted to see someone throw a punch over Chomsky?”

“C’mon, John. Aren’t you angry?”

And that’s when I realised that no, I wasn’t angry with you, not even a little bit.’

April 2014£12.99Demy Pb0416ppISBN 978 1 84668 933 8


When you swear to love, to be faithful, or to do your duty, how does that promise bind you?

John Knox falls passionately and irrevocably in love with Rachel McAllistair the first time they meet. He interviews her for his radio show, and afterwards, when he tells her how impressive she was, she hits him, square on the jaw. Undeterred, he pursues her, promising to love her and never to leave her.

This promise becomes his burden, as her behaviour whirls out of control. She is abusive and cruel. And yet he stays. Even when she does something so awful that his life is changed forever. And that point, on which his life turns, leads him to an unexpected connection with a man who suffered a terrible injury in the First World War.

The Death of the Poet is a daringly honest, transfixing story about being in thrall to someone, being a victim and a protector, and how early promise can turn into an utterly unrecognisable life. An exploration of violence and what it means to be a man in the modern world, it’s controversial, devastating, and, in a complicated way, romantic too.

FICTIONThe Death of the PoetN Quentin Woolf

RIGHTS INFORMATION

RIGHTS DIRECTOR: Penny Daniel at Profile BooksTel: +44 20 7841 6300

Email: [email protected]

TRANSLATION RIGHTS VIA: Andrew Nurnberg AssociatesTel: +44 20 3327 0400Fax: +44 20 7253 4851


US RIGHTS VIA: George Lucas at Inkwell ManagementTel: 00 1 212 922 3500Fax: 00 1 212 922 0535


serpent's tail rights guide 2014

Documents