Dear newsletter subscriber
For the second year running, Andrew Lownie has been shortlisted for Literary Agent of the Year at the Bookseller Industry Awards. He continues to be the top-selling agent in the world. He was on the Agents of Change panel at the London Author Fair, discussing developments in the roles of publisher and agent, and in particular the agency’s in-house imprint Thistle Publishing and on a final panel looking at the future of publishing.
Jessie Childs’s God’s Traitors was no 5 in the Evening Standard’s London best sellers and continues to be reviewed widely and well.
Bobby Friedman’s Democracy Ltd: How money and donations have corrupted British politics. was one of six books short-listed for the ‘Practical Politics Book of the Year’ at the British Political Awards .
Kathleen O’Shea’s Little Drifters spent four weeks in the non-fiction paperback list .
Katharine Quarmby was nominated for a Bread and Roses award which seeks to celebrate excellence in the field of radical political non-fiction.
After her appearance on ITV’s This Morning, Monica Porter’s Raven: My year of dating dangerously… shot up the Amazon bestseller rankings, entering the Top 10 of Memoirs. The book was serialised over three weeks in the Mail on Sunday.
Desmond Seward’s history of the Plantagenets The Demon's Brood, was well-reviewed including a glowing review in The Times by celebrated historical novelist Philippa Gregory.
True Lies by Ross Slater and Douglas Wight was serialised in the Mirror.
Mandy Smith’s memoir of flying with Virgin airlines Cabin Fever was Cosmo’s Book of the Month.
March Deals
Icon bought UK rights in Mark Felton’s X Men: Britain’s Last and Most Daring Raid of World War II They publish his Zero Night: The Most Daring Great Escape of World War II in October.
Duckworth bought World English rights in Eleanor Fitzsimon’s Wilde's Women , a ground-breaking new book which explores the many rewarding relationships that the writer Oscar Wilde enjoyed with a series of fascinating and accomplished women throughout his life.
Cathy Glass’s latest fostering memoir The Child Bride was sold to Harper Collins.
St Martin’s Press have bought world rights in Christian Jennings’ If I Live to See the Dawn : At War on the Gothic Line 1944 - '45 an account of a crucial battle in Italy in 1944 told through the exploits of twelve men of eight different nationalities.
Pegasus bought US rights in Elizabeth Norton’s The Seymour Scandal the little-known story of how Queen Elizabeth 1, aged fourteen, fell in love with a man who was attractive, charming and exciting but who was also three times her age, her stepmother’s husband and the most dangerous man in England.
Polish rights in Carol Lee’s To Die For: A young woman's battle with anorexia
German rights in Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Origins of the First World War.
French rights in Daniel Tammet’s Fragments of Heaven and his fiction The Novel of Chess.
French rights in Casey Watson’s Little Prisoners: A tragic story of two siblings trapped in a world of suffering and abuse
Andrew Lownie
Selected current submissions
The memoirs of the legendary SAS soldier who Rusty Firmin who led one of the two assault teams which stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in May 1980. The Regiment: 15 Years in the SAS
Ian Graham’s biographical collection Courtesan tells the stories of the lives of the most famous, or notorious, women whose liaisons with royalty and aristocrats brought them wealth, fame and freedom undreamt of by most women of their time. US rights sold to St Martin’s Press.
Michele Humphrey’s Irreplaceable, ghosted by Caro Handley, is a memoir of how a young mother coped with the suicide of her husband.
Banker and historian David Lough’s ‘Churchill and his Money: A Perfect Sieve’ tells the hitherto unknown story of Churchill’s lifetime of problems with his personal finances.
Sian Mackay The Incredible Mr Ripper is the extraordinary story of the Austrian aristocrat, Baron Rudolph ‘Rip’ von Ripper (1905-60) from his rebellious childhood in the imperial Austria-Hungary court, to his eventual acclaim as an artist and US military hero and work as a CIA agent tracing Nazi war criminals.
Tracy Norton’s For the Love of Lexie is the account of one woman’s fight – firstly to help her daughter overcome addiction, and then, when that failed, to keep her grand-daughter Lexie safe
Tim Tate’s Hitler, Erika and M a powerful, first-person account of being at the heart of one of the Nazi’s cruellest and most obscene experiments - the Lebensborn program to create a new Aryan master race.
Lee Trimble’s biography of his father Beyond the Call: The Incredible True Story of One American’s Life-or-Death Mission on the Eastern Front in World War II tells the extraordinary World War Two story of an US pilot who covertly smuggled over a thousand people to freedom, including American POWs, foreign slave labourers and concentration camp inmates, from his airbase in the Ukraine. US rights sold to Penguin
David Haviland
Fiction submissions
Rickshaw, a gritty, comic tale of London nightlife and redemption from David McGrath.
The Gaps Between the Tracks, a quirky mystery featuring a blind detective, the debut novel from record producer Andy Bracken.
Weep No More, a romantic saga set against the sweep of history, in the tradition of James Clavell, Noel Barber and Colleen McCullough, by bestselling novelist Marius Gabriel.
Louisa Treger’s literary novel The Lodger, which tells the story of the passionate affair between writer Dorothy Richardson and H. G. Wells. US rights sold to St Martin’s Press.
Dominic Adler’s hard-boiled thriller The Ninth Circle, featuring reluctant assassin Cal Winter and his enigmatic employers The Firm.
The Art of Letting Go a thoughtful and surprising drama about art and artifice by award-winning debut novelist Chloe Banks.
Warwick Cairns’ action-packed historical romp The Fall, set during the English Civil War.
April Publications
Anna Birch’s Call the Vet: Farmers, Dramas and Disasters - My First Year as a Country Vet
The paperback of Mary Hollingsworth’s The Borgias : History's Most Notorious Dynasty
The paperback of Robert Hutchinson’s Spanish Armada
Rachel Kelly’s memoir Black Rainbow: Breakdown to Breakthrough
David Long’s A History of London in 100 Places
BBC Economics correspondent Hugh Pym’s Inside the Banking Crisis
Jimmy Tippet’s memoir Born Gangster ghosted by Nicola Stow
The paperback of Reg Twigg’s Survivor on the River Kwai
Articles
Andrew Lownie explains how the agency goes about selling its authors in How the agency places its authors
Christian Jennings gives his tips on How to write a good non-fiction book proposal for submission
Best wishes, Andrew Lownie and David Haviland
