category: Fiction

Would You Ask My Husband That?

Reminiscent of MOTHERLAND with a touch of THE AFFAIR, WOULD YOU ASK MY HUSBAND THAT? follows Sarah as she takes over her husband Will’s executive job (a job she has longed for) after he is suddenly fired. Told from alternating perspectives, navigating their new roles in the marriage, the novel subverts our expectations and challenges our prejudices in a refreshing, light-hearted yet provocative way. It was snapped up by Embla Books in a two-book deal, and will publish in August 2023, with the second book to publish in summer 2024. You can read The Bookseller announcement here.

 

It’s her dream job … The only problem is, it belongs to her husband.

 

Will and Sarah are a (mostly) happily married couple, raising two young children, while both working full-time – for the same company.

 

After Will makes a thoughtless mistake, he’s fired and his executive job is offered to Sarah. It’s the role she’s always wanted, and would probably have got if she hadn’t gone part-time for a few years after the kids were born. And they could certainly use the money now that Will’s out of work. It’s a no brainer, surely…

 

… That is, if Will can swallow his resentment that his wife’s doing his old job (alongside Henry Cavill-lookalike-colleague Tom – who isn’t actually Superman, despite what Sarah thinks); and provided he fulfils the ‘stay at home dad’ brief to Sarah’s standards (rather than his own), so she can actually concentrate on her new role … Everything will work out just fine. Right?

 

Kathleen Whyman is an author, freelance journalist and columnist for Writer’s Forum magazine. Kathleen always aspired to be a novelist, but got slightly sidetracked over the years by her career in journalism, children and Mad Men box sets. It was her eight-year-old daughter’s words, “Stop talking about writing a book and just write one”, that gave her the push she needed. Kathleen lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and two daughters.

Kathleen is represented by Emily Glenister at DHH Literary Agency.

Pirates of Darksea

PIRATES OF DARKSEA is the latest middle-grade novel from bestselling author, Catherine Doyle, which follows a young boy trying to save his brother’s life by embarking on a pirate-filled adventure in the world’s eighth sea. It is fun, moving and filled with a brilliant and barmy cast of characters – with a story of brotherly love and hope at its core. It was part of a four-book deal with Bloomsbury, which also includes Catherine’s debut picture book, and will publish in March 2024. Her novels MIRACLE ON EBENEZER STREET and TWIN CROWNS (co-written with Katherine Webber) are currently under option for Film/TV.

Max and his big brother Christopher have always shared their adventures. In fact for ages they’ve been sneaking down to Galway Bay at the turn of midnight, waiting for Captain O’Malley and his famed pirate ship to take them over the horizon to the magical world of Eighth Sea.

Despite their messages, the Captain never arrived and now, two years later, Christopher is in grave danger. It’s not even the sort of danger Max can help with. Christopher is in hospital and getting sicker. Their parents want to take him far, far away for a new treatment, but they don’t have the money.

That’s when a very loud, bright red parrot visits Max’s House in Bellflower Lane. Squawk is carrying a message from Captain O’Malley, who needs a new crew member to help with a top secret quest. The reward is treasure beyond Max’s wildest dreams. He’s going to sail to the Eighth Sea, but he hadn’t bargained on coming face to face with a monster, one that is eating the islands of the Eighth Sea one by one.

Catherine Doyle lives in the West of Ireland. She holds a BA in Psychology and an MA in Publishing. Her work, which includes Middle Grade and Young Adult fiction, has been published in over 25 languages. Her award-winning and bestselling middle grade STORM KEEPER trilogy is set on the magical island of Arranmore, where her grandparents grew up. Her modern re-imagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, THE MIRACLE ON EBENEZER STREET, was published by Puffin books in October 2020. Her most recent MG novel, THE LOST GIRL KING, was released in September 2022. Her bestselling YA novel, TWIN CROWNS, co-authored with Katherine Webber, published in May 2022. The sequel, CURSED CROWNS, published in April 2023.

Catherine is represented by Claire Wilson at RCW Literary Agency.

Scrap

The Film/TV Rights are currently under option.

With the author’s intoxicating, compulsive, and blackly comic flair, SCRAP follows Esther Ray as she pieces together the life of a stranger – uncovering dark and sinister truths. As you may remember, OTHER PEOPLE’S CLOTHES was one of the most anticipated novels of 2021, was part of a big auction for film and TV and is currently in development with Mark Gordon Pictures. Screenwriter Alexa Karolinksi (UNORTHODOX) is writing, and Calla is also closely involved in the process.

Esther Ray legally can’t talk about what made her drop out of the glitzy New York art world and start making books by hand, but she’s sworn off working for the rich and now she’s happy. She’s just bought a cabin in the mountains with her fiancée Jessica and they’re planning on having a baby.

But when Jessica abruptly breaks it off, leaving her with the cabin’s mortgage, Esther is forced to accept a job from Naomi Duncan, yet another member of the art adjacent criminally wealthy. Naomi ships over two hundred boxes of ephemera from her family’s life, and under the guise of extreme birthday secrecy, instructs Esther to produce a series of scrapbooks for her husband’s surprise party. Esther quickly becomes obsessed with the Duncans, fixating on their lavish lives, and their eighteen-year-old Tik-Tok influencer daughter, Tabitha.

While binging true crime podcasts and sorting through the contents of the boxes, Esther comes to realize it’s not just family photos that Naomi has been hoarding. When Naomi suddenly dies before the project is complete, Esther becomes convinced she was murdered. Inspired by the amateur detectives that narrate her bloody podcasts, Esther uses what she has learned from the scrapbooks to embed herself in the Duncan’s life, in an attempt to find out who killed Naomi and why.

Calla Henkel is an American writer, playwright, director, and artist who lives and works in Berlin. She has staged plays at Volksbühne Berlin, The Whitney Museum of Art, as well as at New Theater, the experimental theatre space she founded and programmed in Berlin from 2013-2015. Her art writing has been published in periodicals such as Texte zur Kunst, Spike, Mousse, and others and her artistic work with Max Pitegoff has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. She currently operates a bar, performance space, and film studio called TV in Berlin.

The People Watcher

The Film/TV Rights are currently under option.

‘I watch them because I think they need help.’

 Mercy Lake likes to fix things. To fix people. Trapped inside during daylight hours, hostage to her phobias, she uses the cover of night to watch the people in her town. And if someone needs her help, she steps in – secretly and with compassion.

When Mercy meets Louis, her lonely, unusual life is suddenly filled with excitement. Because Louis likes intervening in other people’s lives too, only he prefers a more direct – even violent – approach. As they grow closer, Mercy is enchanted but frightened by his actions. How many lines is he willing to cross? And how much is he prepared to risk?

And then there’s Nadia. Nadia knows she’s being watched, even if the police think differently. But with her own secrets to protect, she’s not going to wait around for the watcher to make their move. She’s going to stop them dead.

Sam Lloyd grew up in Hampshire, where he learned his love of storytelling. These days he lives in Surrey with his wife, three young sons and a dog that likes to howl. His first thrillers, THE MEMORY WOOD and THE RISING TIDE, were published to huge critical acclaim in 2020 and 2021. Sam Lloyd is represented by Sam Copeland at RCW Literary Agency.

Spoilt Creatures

SPOILT CREATURES skilfully and elegantly explores female rage and transgression as, over the course of a blistering summer, a women’s commune’s precarious existence is irreversibly threatened. It has a totally enthralling ensemble cast of characters – including the brilliantly awful Blythe, with fascinating dynamics and tensions between them. It won the BPA Pitch Prize and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition and Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award; it will be published in June 2024 as one of Headline Tinder Press’s lead debuts.

‘People looked at the photographs and decided they knew everything about us. Believing in the oil spill of newspaper ink, how it clung to every shadow, conspiring grit and gloom. Always the same photos, of the farmhouse coming apart. Gaping windows like teeth punched out, streaks of blood across the kitchen floor where the women had walked with glass in their feet. […] People looked at them and came to their own conclusions – about Breach House, and about us. What kind of women we were. They never saw us in the summer, how we dug our hands into the soil and pulled life from it. The long evenings spent on the lawn. They never saw the life we had made for ourselves.’

 

32-year-old Iris is adrift: newly single, living at home with her mother and working a dead-end job. While out walking one day, she meets mysterious, beguiling Hazel, who lives at a women’s commune on a remote farm hidden in the Kent Downs. Iris is drawn to Hazel and the possibilities offered by an all-female space in a world where men have only let her down. At the farm, the women can be loud and dirty, live and eat abundantly, under the leadership of the gargantuan Blythe.

Over the course of a blistering summer, Iris throws herself into this alternative way of life, seizing on new experiences and hidden desires. But even among the women, she witnesses power struggles, cruelty and transgressions that will threaten their precarious existence. When a group of men arrive on the farm, the commune’s existence is thrown into question, culminating in an act of devastating violence.

 

Amy Twigg was born and raised in Kent. After studying Creative Writing at university, she moved to Surrey where she works as a freelance copywriter. She is also an alumnus of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course and has been mentored by Tom de Freston. Amy is represented by Charlotte Seymour at Johnson & Alcock.

The Wardrobe Department

THE WARDROBE DEPARTMENT by Elaine Garvey, which follows a young woman who has moved from rural Ireland to work as a dresser at a theatre in London’s West End. It is a short, spare novel, beautifully told and full of wise observations. It is about a woman finding herself; mothers and daughters, and the power of the past – and the potential of the present too. The publishing rights were secured by Canongate after a four-way auction, with publication planned for Spring 2025. You can read more in The Bookseller here. It has incredible parts particularly in Mairéad and her mother. I know theatre can be tricky in film and TV but this really is the backdrop for a powerful character led, female story.

It’s 2002 and Mairéad Sweeney has moved from rural Ireland to work in London’s West End. She is struggling to adjust to her workplace, The St. Leonard Theatre, and to life in London where she feels she does not belong and is disorientated. But then an unexpected journey home leads her to confront hidden truths about herself. Back in rural Ireland at the wake of her grandmother, she starts to reckon with the things — and people — she grew up with. It’s there that Mairéad gets a glimpse of who she is now and of what her life could be.

It’s partly inspired by Buile Suibhne, (Sweeney Astray), an old Irish poem about a king who is transformed into a bird and exiled from his people. It also comes out of Elaine’s personal experiences of fifteen years of working in the theatre in various visitor services roles.

Elaine Garvey is from Co. Sligo, Ireland. She completed an M.Phil. in Creative Writing in Trinity College, Dublin in 2000. Her short stories have been published in The Dublin Review and Winter Papers. She has worked as editorial and programme co-ordinator at The Stinging Fly, was awarded an agility grant for her writing and has recently been selected as a participant on a basic income scheme for artists by the Irish Department of Arts. THE WARDROBE DEPARTMENT is her first novel.

Elaine is represented by Eleanor Birne at PEW Literary Agency.

Deadly Animals

Set in South Birmingham, DEADLY ANIMALS is a unique and beautifully written crime novel about a small community’s descent into devastation and desperation – and the undying spirit of youth in the face of darkness. It feels like you could really ramp up the horror elements. It was snapped up by Zaffre in a major two-book deal 6-figure pre-empt, and is scheduled for publication in Spring 2024. DEADLY ANIMALS was also a finalist in the Daily Mail First Novel competition; you can read more in The Bookseller here.

Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. Exceptionally bright, she has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose. The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava likes nothing better than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den so she can study it.

But one day, when she arrives, she stumbles across the body of local teenager Mickey Grant. 

Detective Seth Delahaye is given the case, but Ava is not the sort of person to step back and let someone else take charge when kids like her are dying. She has dealt with bullies all her life – from stepdads to playground trolls. How hard can it be to find a killer? 

Marie Tierney is a biology teacher who works in Birmingham. DEADLY ANIMALS is her first novel, and she is represented by Luigi Bonomi and LBA Books.

The Graveyard Shift

THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT cleverly combines pop culture and horror in a millennial skewing slasher-crime, and sees a horror-loving radio show become the stage of a gruesome murder. Finely plotted with a brilliant central character, THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT is a magnificent resurgence of the literary slasher through a modern, feminist lens. It will be published by Datura Books in UK and US in September 2023. You can read more in The Bookseller announcement here.  Maria is an experienced screenwriter but also open to discussion about whether or not she would adapt this – strike dependent!

Tinsel Munroe’s dream of working in radio hasn’t turned out to be everything she hoped it would. She has her own show – the aptly titled The Graveyard Shift – where she celebrates the sounds of horror-cinema. It’s a pop cultural oasis for the niche audience she has cultivated, but the wage is barely enough to cover her rent and the midnight hours are putting a strain on her relationship with tattooist boyfriend, Zack. After three years at Melbourne’s coolest station, she’s seemingly no closer to a prime-time slot.

That is, until someone is murdered live on air.

Mistaking it for a Halloween prank at first, a visit from police informs Tinsel that the hysterical call was, in fact, the real deal. She is freaked out by the horrible incident, but her true crime obsessed sister Pandora is fascinated by it. While detectives assure them the killer will soon be caught, the bodies continue to drop with the killer striking at locations tied to Australian film history in increasingly gruesome ways. With a growing, macabre audience to her radio show – that potentially includes the killer – Tinsel begins receiving strange messages over the text lines. Her home and her workplace suddenly aren’t the sanctuaries she once thought they were.

Tinsel and her sister are left no choice but to team up with Detective James as they race to find the connection between her and the culprit. The people she thought she could trust are now those she should fear the most. In order to survive, Tinsel is going to have to listen to more than just the airwaves…

Maria Lewis is a best-selling author, screenwriter, and pop culture etymologist from Australia. She’s the author of the internationally published Supernatural Sisters series of eight books, which includes the Aurealis Award-winning THE WITCH WHO COURTED DEATH. As a screenwriter, she has worked across projects for AMC, Netflix, SBS, Ubisoft, ABC, DC Comics and many more. She’s the presenter, writer and producer of award-winning audio documentaries, and her journalism has appeared in publications around the world (such as the New York Post, Guardian and Daily Mail). THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT is the triumphant return to her first love: she started out as a crime beat reporter…

Maria is represented by Ed Wilson at Johnson and Alcock.

One

In ONE, Eve takes us to a future where a cataclysmic climate emergency has spawned a one-child policy in the UK, ruthlessly spawned by a totalitarian regime. It is pacey, grounded, twisty and tackles dark themes, but it has a powerful and heart-warming story of two estranged sisters at the core. It will be published by Orenda Books on 20th July 2023.

A powerful, prescient speculative thriller: a woman’s job of enforcing climate-emergency Britain’s one-child policy is compromised when she discovers a personal link to an illegal sibling on the Ministry hit-list, leading to a shocking discovery that changes everything…

One law. One child. Seven million crimes…

A cataclysmic climate emergency has spawned a one-child policy in the UK, ruthlessly enforced by a totalitarian regime. Compulsory abortion of ‘excess’ pregnancies and mandatory contraceptive implants are now the norm, and families must adhere to strict consumption quotas as the world descends into chaos.

Kai is a 25-year-old ‘baby reaper’, working for the Ministry of Population and Family Planning. If any of her assigned families attempt to exceed their child quota, she ensures they pay the price.

Until, one morning, she discovers that an illegal sibling on her Ministry hit-list is hers. To protect her parents from severe penalties, she must secretly investigate before anyone else finds out.

Kai’s hunt for her forbidden sister unearths much more than a dark family secret. As she stumbles across a series of heinous crimes perpetrated by the people she trusted most, she makes a catastrophic discovery that could bring down the government … and tear her family apart.

Eve Smith writes speculative fiction, mainly about the things that scare her. Longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize and described by Waterstones as “an exciting new voice in crime fiction”, Eve’s debut novel THE WAITING ROOMS, set in the aftermath of an antibiotic resistance crisis, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award and was selected as a Book of the Month by Eric Brown in The Guardian who compared her writing to Michael Crichton’s. Her second novel, OFF TARGET, explores the idea of genetically engineered babies. Eve’s previous job as COO of an environmental charity took her to research projects across Asia, Africa and the Americas, and she has an ongoing passion for wild creatures, wild science and far-flung places. When she’s not writing she’s racing across fields after her dog, trying to organise herself and her family, or off exploring somewhere new.

Eve is represented by Harry Illingworth at DHH Literary Agency.

Once Upon A Legend

ONCE UPON A LEGEND is a heart-warming and hilarious take on the legend of King Arthur, which sees a rebellious young boy unwittingly summon giants once defeated by Merlin, and finds himself forced to stop them from unleashing chaos and destroying London. Ben recently signed a major six-book deal with Simon & Schuster, which includes three standalone middle grade adventures and two further Christmas books. ONCE UPON A LEGEND will be published in Autumn 2023.

 

13-year-old Marcus cannot cope with school. He hates it and everything to do with it.  Ever since his parents have split up, all he has felt is a huge anger inside him and he can’t help it if sometimes this boils over. His school though has had enough, and they summon him into the school to tell him he is being sent to a special school for one term – it is called Merlins – and it is where difficult children are sent. 

 

When Marcus arrives there, he is told the school is built on a magical site, a place where centuries ago, the wizard Merlin defeated the old giants roaming Europe, and confined them to the hills and mountains around the school. Marcus thinks this is nonsense until one night, he breaks into the headmaster’s office and steals what he believes is Merlin’s magic wand.  He climbs the nearest hill to the school and summons all the giants to come out of their prison if they dare.  Before he knows it, the giants do start coming out of the hills.  Angry at being confined for so long, they are determined to destroy London and the whole of Europe and reclaim their power.  Marcus’s trouble making has unleashed chaos and hell on Earth.  Only one person can now stop them – Marcus himself.  Can he team up with the other children and save the world? Will the one friendly giant be able to help him?  Can he find the hero within himself to save London from destruction? 

 

Large giants, one friendly giant (the rest not), Stonehenge, Merlin and magic gone wrong, humour, slapstick but also fast action drama with London about to be destroyed, a young boy angry with his parents’ divorce having to find inner strength. 

 

Ben Miller is the bestselling author of magical stories for all the family. He is also an actor, director and comedian, best-known for the ARMSTRONG AND MILLER sketch show, the JOHNNY ENGLISH and PADDINGTON films, BBC’s DEATH IN PARADISE and Netflix’s BRIDGERTON.