category: Recently Optioned

MRS S

An Observer best debut novel of 2023

‘The intense physicality of the novel’s emotions and its stylish, stripped-back prose make for an arresting pairing’ Hephzibah Anderson, Observer

‘Atmospheric and daring’ Guardian

‘There’s nothing else like it out there’ The Times

‘Bold and beautiful… Desire crackles through these pages like fire’  Telegraph

‘Embraces and then toys with our expectation of the lesbian romance… Spare and direct’ London Review of Books

 

MRS S is a love story told over a smoldering summer at an elite boarding school. While it’s a poignant portrayal of a particular queer experience – a romance between a young teacher and the headmaster’s wife – it’s also a universal tale of longing and what it is to see and be seen.

 

In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of ‘matron’. 

Within this landscape of immense privilege, in which the girls can sense the slightest weakness in those around them, she finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body.

That is until she meets Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity.

Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into Mrs S’s world and their unspoken desire blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. 

But, as the summer begins to fade, both women know that a choice must be made.

 

K Patrick is based in Glasgow. Their poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Granta and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021, the same year that K was also shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize.

In 2020 they were runner-up in the Ivan Juritz Prize and the Laura Kinsella Fellowship.

RIGGED: The Incredible True Story of the Whistleblowers Jailed after Exposing the Rotten Heart of the Financial System

In RIGGED, Andy Verity has compiled a ground-breaking account that picks up where Michael Lewis’ BIG SHORT left us; Andy leads us through the fall-out of the financial crisis in the UK and US and reveals how a group of traders were wrongfully accused of ‘rigging’ in an effort to cover up the wrongdoings higher up. In particular, RIGGED, focuses on the 9 trials that took place between 2015 and 2019 – telling those specific stories within this bigger picture shines a light on this  corruption, collusion and miscarriage of justice through the stories of the humans involved – and who fell victim to the system.

Rigged exposes a cover-up at the highest level on both sides of the Atlantic, upending the official story of the biggest scandal since the global financial crisis. It picks up where The Big Short leaves off, as the dark clouds of the financial crisis gather. Banks’ health is judged by an interest rate called Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate). The higher the Libor, the worse off the bank; too high and it’s goodnight Vienna. Libor is heading skywards. To save themselves from collapse, nationalisation and loss of bonuses, banks instruct traders to manipulate Libor down – a criminal practice known as lowballing. Outraged, traders turn whistleblowers, alerting the authorities.

As Rigged reveals, their instructions come first from top bosses – then from central banks and governments.

But when the scandal explodes into the news, prosecutors allow banks to cover up the evidence pointing to the top. Instead, they accuse 37 traders of another kind of interest rate ‘rigging’ that no-one had seen as a crime. In nine trials from 2015 to 2019, nineteen are convicted and sentenced. Rigged exclusively shows why all the defendants are innocent, and how any real culprits go unpunished.

How could this happen? Turns out, it’s not just the market that’s rigged. It’s the entire system.

 

Andy is the award-winning economics correspondent for BBC News, covering finance and business on the BBC radio and TV bulletins as well as reporting for Panorama, BBC Newsnight and BBC Radio 4’s investigative strand, File on Four.  He can currently be heard on the Today programme, Radio Four’s six o’clock news and the BBC News TV channel.

Joining the BBC from The Independent, he worked first as personal finance correspondent then as a presenter on BBC Radio Five Live, where for 8 years he hosted the BBC’s daily financial radio programme and popular podcast Wake up to Money.

Before the credit crunch struck in 2007 he proposed a TV series warning of the risks of an imminent crash in the housing market which became BBC2’s The Truth About Property, attracting an unusually large audience; it was repeat-commissioned both before and after the crisis of 2008.

Since being appointed economics correspondent in 2014, he’s broadcast and published high-impact investigative stories including a Panorama film which revealed the Bank of England’s role in the Libor scandal and a 2018 documentary exposing money laundering by a Ukrainian gangster, where he made headlines when one of the gangster’s thugs kicked him in the groin.

In a more recent film, Following the Drug Money, Andy exposed how global consultants EY covered up evidence of smuggling by an organised crime gang that was laundering  the proceeds of sales of illegal drugs in the UK via the gold markets of Dubai.

Nesting

The Film/TV Rights are currently under option.

NESTING is the story of one woman’s fight to escape a controlling relationship, overcome homelessness, and rebuild a life for herself and her children. It was snapped up by Scribner in the UK after a fiercely contested nine-way auction, and will be published as a superlead title in February 2025. North American rights were also pre-empted by Algonquin/Hachette US.

It is 2018 and Dublin rents are soaring, homelessness is rising and families are being forced into emergency accommodation. For Ciara Fay, home is no longer safe. Eight weeks pregnant with a third child, she knows she can’t stay in her marriage. Her family are in England but her daughters can’t leave Ireland without their father’s permission. This is not the first time Ciara has tried to escape. With no money and no job, emergency accommodation at the run-down Hotel Eden is the only option. But as summer passes and winter closes in, Ciara struggles with raising two children in a hotel room, searching for a home and dealing with an abusive ex. 

Roisín O’Donnell’s short story ‘Sleep Watchers’ was shortlisted for Short Story of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards this year. Her story, HOW TO BUILD A SPACE ROCKET, won the same prize in 2018. She is the author of the collection WILD QUIET, published by New Island Books in 2016, which was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award 2017 as well as the International Rubery Book Award. NESTING is her first novel. She lives near Dublin with her two children. Roisín is represented by Eleanor Birne at PEW Literary Agency.

Arrangements in Blue

The Film/TV Rights are currently under option.

In her debut non-fiction, Key uses Joni Mitchell’s seminal album BLUE as her guide in navigating experiences of loneliness, desire, disappointment and romantic love. It was snapped up Jonathan Cape in the UK after a 7-way auction, and was published 6th April 2023. US Rights were secured by Liveright, and was published on 9th May.

When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn’t happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love.

Using Joni Mitchell’s seminal album Blue – which shaped Key’s expectations of love – as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed.

With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a book which inspires us to live and love more honestly.

Key is a poet and writer based in London. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe (Salt, 2013) and Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe, 2018), which was a book of the year in the Guardian, New Statesman, Times and Irish Times. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised, and her essays have appeared in At the Pond (Daunt Books, 2019), Granta, Poetry Review and elsewhere. Her essay about Mitchell, “A Breed of Blue”, was published by Granta last December. Amy is represented by Angelique Tran Van Sang at Felicity Bryan Associates.

The Girl for the Job

THE GIRL FOR THE JOB is an entertaining memoir about Danni Brooke’s time as an undercover cop, giving us an insight into undercover police work from a woman’s point of view, and taking us from the moment a young Danni joins the Met, to the point she was selected for undercover work and dispatched out onto dangerous cases across the UK.

 

For over a decade Danni Brooke was one of the most effective female undercover cops in the UK, one of a very small number of women in the Met’s elite unit.

She was so successful at taking down criminals that she was seconded to forces around the country.

Whether she was infiltrating organized crime gangs or disrupting drug supply lines, Danni played the innocent Essex girl, fooling even the most suspicious villains, using her quick wits to keep her out of trouble. She loved the job but the pressures of her work and trying to balance the long hours with being a mother, were to take a toll on her personal life.

In her honest, warm and gripping memoir, Danni also reveals why she left the police, how she found a new career (and love) on HUNTED (C4 series) – and why the thrill of covert work still pulls her into private investigations.

 

Today Danni Brooke enjoys the quiet life with her two children at her home in Spain, where she also runs a cybersecurity company with partner and fellow TV hunter Ben Owen.

Since leaving the force in 2013 she has built up a successful career as an investigator on C4’s Hunted, now in its tenth series. She has also participated in the Celebrity Hunted programmes, appeared on ITV’s This Morning, taken part in the C5 series Celebrity Trolls and is stars in the new C4 gameshow, Who Won’t Believe This, hosted by Ellie Taylor. Danni has also filmed a pilot with a Hollywood production company.

Bad Men

The Film/TV Rights are currently under option.

BAD MEN is the story of Saffy Huntley-Oliver who, for the past fifteen years, has been hunting down and killing bad men: rapists, murderers, domestic abusers. The problem is that it’s hard to sustain a healthy, balanced heterosexual relationship when you’re expecting to have to kill your boyfriend at any moment. That’s why she’s decided to look for a good man instead, preferably one who shares her interests. So begins a tale of obsession as Saffy uses every trick in the book to get her man. Regardless of the cost to human life…

Bonnier Zaffre books pre-empted BAD MEN and will publish in hardback, ebook and audio in July 2023. 

SAFFY HUNTLEY-OLIVER is beautiful, charming, rich, and in her spare time she’s a serial killer of bad men: rapists, murderers, domestic abusers. But it’s hard to sustain a relationship when you’re expecting to have to kill your boyfriend at any moment. She’s decided to look for a good man instead, preferably one who shares her interests. Campaigning true-crime podcaster JON DESROSIERS is perfect.

On the same day that his wife AMY leaves him, Jon finds a headless human body on his doorstep. He soon becomes a suspect in the crime, but when Saffy orchestrates a meet-cute with Jon, she volunteers to help him clear his name. What better way to get close to a cute guy than to talk about murder together?

But things do not stay perfect for a while. Framed for the poisoning of his ex-wife, and kidnapped by his number one fan at gunpoint – things go from bad to worse for Jon. Fortunately, Saffy is always on hand to help… but what part exactly has she played in everything? And when will she kill again?

Julie Mae Cohen is the pen name of Julie Cohen, a million-copy bestselling author of book club and romantic fiction, including the award-winning novel TOGETHER. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages. Julie is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Reading. She is a Vice President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the founder of the Rainbow Chapter for writers of LGBTQIA+ love stories.  She is Patron of literacy charity ABC To Read. Julie grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University and the University of Reading. She lives in Berkshire with her son and a terrier of dubious origin. BAD MEN is her début thriller.

How To Solve Your Own Murder

This title is currently under option.

In 1965, when Frances Adams was seventeen, a fortune teller at a country fair told her that one day she’d be murdered. Thus began a lifetime of trying to prevent the crime that would be her eventual demise.

No one took Frances seriously for sixty years – until, of course, she was murdered. But for Frances, being the village busybody was a form of insurance. She’d spent a lifetime compiling dirt on every person she met, just in case they might turn out to be her killer. In the heart of her sprawling country estate lies an eccentric library of detective work, where the right person could step in and use her findings to solve her murder, if they can make sense of her superstitious filing system first.

When her great-niece Annie arrives from London and discovers that Frances’ worst fear has come true, Annie is thrust into her great-aunt’s last act of revenge against her sceptical friends and family. Frances’ last will and testament stipulates that the person who solves her murder inherits her millions, and she’s challenged a group that includes Annie to prove to the world that Frances was right all along about her future. Can Annie unravel the mystery and find justice for Frances, or will digging up the past lead her into the path of the killer?

K L Perrin is originally from Seattle, Washington, where she spent several years working as a bookseller before moving to the UK to do a Masters and PhD. She lives with her family in Surrey, where she can be found poking around vintage bookstores, stomping in the mud with her two kids, and collecting too many plants. Perrin is represented by Zoe Bent at The Bent Agency.

Fearless

*This book is currently under option*

FEARLESS is a fast-paced thriller featuring lone-wolf protagonist Ben Koenig, who, six years after disappearing off the face of the earth, is hunted down and recruited for a dangerous mission – he’s the only man for the job, as he is incapable of experiencing fear…. There is also a fascinating central female character, US Marshal Jen Draper – smart, ruthless, with a passionate dislike for Ben – but is she working with him or against him?

The new series was signed by Constable in a six-figure deal in the UK and by Flatiron in the US, along with the continuation of the Sunday Times bestselling and Dagger winning Washington Poe series, which was previously in development for TV and has been the recipient of numerous awards and accolades (listed below). You can read the Bookseller announcement here.

Six years back Ben Koenig headed up the US Marshal’s Special Operations Group. They were the unit who hunted the bad guys. The really bad guys. They did this so no one else had to.

And then one day Ben sold his house, liquidated his assets and disappeared off the face of the earth. He told no one why and left no forwarding address. For six years he became a grey man. Someone you didn’t remember. He drifted from town to town, from state to state, never visiting the same place twice. He was untraceable – officially, he no longer existed.

But now his face is plastered across every television screen in the country. Someone from Ben’s past is going to extraordinary lengths to find him and they don’t care how they do it. They have a job for him, a revenge mission, one Ben won’t be able to refuse. Because in the hellish heat of the Chihuahuan desert lies a town called Gauntlet. Some people in Gauntlet have a secret and they’ll do anything protect it. And they know Ben is coming. They’ve killed before and they’ll kill again.

It’s easy to dismiss Ben Koenig as just another drifter, someone you don’t need to concern yourself about. But that would be a mistake. Because Ben has a condition, a unique disorder that means he is incapable of experiencing fear. And that makes Ben Koenig a different kind of animal . . .

Multi-award-winning author M. W. Craven was born in Carlisle but grew up in Newcastle. He joined the army at sixteen, leaving ten years later to complete a social work degree. Seventeen years after taking up a probation officer role in Cumbria, at the rank of assistant chief officer, he became a full-time author. THE PUPPET SHOW, the first book in his Cumbria-set Washington Poe series, was published by Little, Brown in 2018 and went on to win the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2019. It has now been translated into twenty-five languages. BLACK SUMMER, the second in the series, was longlisted for the 2020 Gold Dagger as was book three, THE CURATOR in 2021. The fourth in the series, DEAD GROUND, was published in 2021, became an instant Sunday Times bestseller and has been longlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Theakston Old Peculiar Novel of the Year 2022.

Craven is represented by David H Headley at D H H Literary Agency, and FEARLESS will be published by Constable in the UK and Flatiron in the US in Summer 2023.

Truly, Darkly Deeply

*This title is currently under option.*

Truly, Darkly, Deeply is a captivating, terrifying, and addictive serial killer thriller, which was pre-empted by Quercus in six-figure deal. It flips the genre, with intriguing and complex central characters.

Twelve-year-old Sophie and her mother, Amelia-Rose, move to London from Massachusetts where they meet the charismatic Matty Melgren, who quickly becomes an intrinsic part of their lives. But as the relationship between the two adults fractures, a serial killer begins targeting young women with a striking resemblance to Amelia-Rose.

When Matty is eventually sent down for multiple murder, questions remain as to his guilt – questions which ultimately destroy both women. Nearly twenty years later, Sophie receives a letter from Battlemouth Prison informing her Matty is dying and wants to meet. It looks like Sophie might finally get the answers she craves. But will the truth set her free – or bury her deeper?

Victoria Selman is the author of the critically acclaimed Ziba MacKenzie series, and her debut novel Blood for Blood was shortlisted for the prestigious CWA Debut Dagger Award and an Amazon Charts #1 bestseller for five weeks. Victoria also co-hosts a true crime podcast and writes freelance opinion pieces on true crime for the Independent.

Truly Darkly Deeply was published in July 2022 by Quercus Books. Victoria is represented for publishing by David H Headely at DHH Literary Agency.

*Currently under option*

Now You See Us

The Film/TV rights are currently under option.

In the same vein as Balli’s previous novels, NOW YOU SEE US takes a darkly humorous approach towards addressing the challenges of marginalised women, and the issues surrounding foreign domestic workers within their own diaspora community. Centring on a mystery, NOW YOU SEE US dives into the characters’ lives as mothers, daughters, lovers, and friends, revealing their rich and diverse lives, their hidden pain and their dreams. It is THE HELP meets CRAZY RICH ASIANS, with an emotional punch. Balli’s book EROTIC STORIES FOR PUNJABI WIDOWS is being developed a feature by Film4 and THE SHERGILL SISTERS is with Muse TV.

A veteran domestic worker, Cora returned to the Philippines several years ago to help to raise her teenage nephew, but the novel opens with her back in Singapore under mysterious circumstances. She’s keeping a secret from her wealthy employer, the recently widowed Elizabeth Lee, and needs to keep a low profile. 

Working as an in-home caretaker for an elderly stroke patient, Angel lives a fulfilling life in Singapore where she has a strong community of friends and a job where she feels valued. However, a recent break-up with a woman has left her feeling lonely in ways that her family cannot accept or understand.

Donita is a fresh domestic worker employed by the difficult-to-please Mrs. Tan.  She’s arrived with hopes for a better life and struggles to accept the reality of her new position.  

The three women are friends who meet on their day off, sometimes to offload horror job stories, but more often to share their hopes and aspirations, to talk and to listen. But when Florediza, another Filipina domestic worker is accused of murder, the three friends find themselves roped into a rogue investigation, despite their best efforts to avoid trouble.

Balli Kaur Jaswal is the author of five novels, including EROTIC STORIES FOR PUNJABI WIDOWS which was a Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club pick in 2018. Born in Singapore and raised in Japan, Russia and the Philippines, Jaswal studied creative writing in the United States and worked as an English teacher in Australia and Turkey. She has held fellowships at the University of East Anglia and Nanyang Technological University, where she also completed her PhD in South Asian diaspora writing. Jaswal’s non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar India, Refinery29 and Salon.com, among other publications. Balli is represented by Anna Power at Johnson and Alcock, and NOW YOU SEE US will be published in UK and US by HarperFiction and William Morrow in 2023.