Eliud Kipchoge is writing a memoir(!) and other notable book deals of the 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 goes to Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Sanjena Sathian’s Gold Diggers, which Publishers Marketplace describes as “an Indian-American serio-comic and magical realist epic about the perils of ambition, tracing the mysterious alchemy of its characters’ transformation from high school in an Atlanta suburb through young adulthood in the Bay Area.”
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The massive deal of the week goes to Abigail Dean’s Girl A, which sold for seven figures at auction to Viking. It’s “narrated by a successful lawyer living in New York who is better known to the public as Girl A, the one who escaped from a childhood of abuse at the hands of religious fanatic parents, freeing her six siblings; when her mother dies in prison and leaves her and her siblings the family home, she can’t run from her past any longer.”
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The first person in history to run a marathon in less than two hours, Olympic medalist, and your current hero Eliud Kipchoge has sold a memoir (obviously)! It details “being raised by a single mother as a member of the Kalenjin people in the Rift Valley of Kenya, his professional running career, and his journey to becoming the greatest marathoner of all time.” Coming to you in summer 2020!
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Historian Benjamin Weber has sold American Purgatory: Mass Incarceration and Empire, a book pitched as “broadening the scope of Douglass Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow to a global scale, revealing that the past use of highly racialized U.S. modes of policing, imprisonment, and forced labor as a tool for building American empire within and beyond borders remains anachronistically entrenched and ever-expanding in the present.”
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Tiger Woods has sold another book, a memoir entitled Back ; he calls it his “definitive story; it’s in my words and expresses my thoughts. It describes how I feel and what’s happened in my life.”
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The bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain Garth Stein has sold a graphic series entitled The Cloven, which “follows the most successful genetically modified human organism ever created; conceived in a privately financed, top-secret laboratory on Washington’s Vashon Island, he is a cross between a human and a goat—a cloven; book one takes the reader through his journey across the Pacific Northwest as he searches for his tribe—a fabled herd of feral cloven living in the Cascade Mountains.” It will be illustrated by cocreator of the Stumptown series Matthew Southworth.
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Director of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska-Lincoln Timothy Schaffert has sold a new novel entitled The Perfume Thief, which is “about a queer American expat with an infamous past as a thief of rare scents who retires to Paris to become a legitimate perfumer, crafting unique scents scents for the city’s cabaret performers and sex workers, until the Nazis occupy the city and seek her expertise for a sinister purpose.” Sounds delicious.
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Documentary filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro has sold Amelia and George, a nonfiction book about “the tumultuous relationship between Amelia Earhart and publishing guru George Palmer Putnam, exploring how her clandestine lover-turned-husband’s disregard of danger in the face of maintaining financial success during the Great Depression may have led to her death.”
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Iowa Writers Workshop MFA Nickolas Butler has sold a new novel, Godspeed, “pitched in the spirit of A Simple Plan, about three troubled construction workers who get entangled in a wealthy homeowner’s dangerous plan to finish building her architectural masterpiece in the Wyoming mountains against an impossible and mysterious deadline, exploring class divisions, violence, and greed in modern American life.”
