All the book deals you need to know about this week.
My personal form of astrology is to anxiously trawl Publishers Marketplace every week. No, wait, hear me out: it’s how I can tell the only future that matters: which books I will be reading a year and a half from now. Also, it’s a nice reminder that publishing isn’t dead. After all, there are so many deals to choose from—but here are the book sales announced this week that we here at Literary Hub are most excited about, from intriguing debuts to new books from established faves.
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The debut deal of the week definitely goes to Robert Webb, of Peep Show fame, whose Come Again is “a time-traveling love story that asks “If you had the chance, would you do it all again?” when a woman wakes up as her 18-year-old self and has a chance to save her husband’s life.” Not what I would have expected, but I’m interested none the less.
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Mena Suvari, star of American Beauty, American Pie, and Loser, has sold a memoir. The Great Peace is “a coming-of-age memoir detailing how, as a young model turned actor, she lost herself in Hollywood to sex, drugs, and abusive relationships—and the difficult journey towards self-acceptance and empowerment.”
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Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award-winning actor, singer, dancer, writer, advocate, and living legend Billy Porter has also sold a memoir. Porter’s is entitled Unprotected, and it is the story “of childhood trauma, creative struggle, public courage, and triumph.” It’s a two book deal—the other book is a picture book. Heart emoji.
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Okay, back to literary people. Booker Prize winner John Banville has sold a new novel entitled Snow, which centers on “an aristocratic family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their home amid a dangerous snowstorm, the first crime novel to be published under the author’s real name after previously writing crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.” Coming to you in October.
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Ken Follett, author of The Pillars of the Earth, has sold a prequel to his bestseller entitled The Evening and the Morning, “an epic journey into a historical past rich with ambition and rivalry, death and birth, love and hate.” Coming to you on September 15, 2020.
