Dear newsletter subscriber,
Another busy month in the agency with the following sales:
Helen Croydon’s F*ck the Fairytale: what if you don’t want marriage and kids?” to John Blake.
Piu Eatwell’s No Body of Evidence: An Extraordinary Edwardian Case of Deception and Intrigue to Head of Zeus
Cathy Glass’s story of her adopted daughter Will You Love Me?: Lucy's Story to Harper Collins.
David Long’s London Lives and A History of London in 100 Places to Oneworld.
The autobiography of Spencer Matthews, star of E4’s hit show Made in Chelsea Spencer Matthews: Confessions of a Lady Thriller to Pan Macmillan.
Sonia Oatley’s poignant memoir about the murder of her daughter Bye, Mam, I love you ghosted by Lynne Barrett-Lee, to John Blake.
Danish rights in Roger Crowley’s Constantinople: The Last Great Siege
Spanish rights in Robert Hutchinson’s Spanish Armada
German rights in Julian Maclaren-Ross’s novel Of Love and Hunger: With an introduction by D.J. Taylor
Japanese rights in Shed Simove’s blank book What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex now sold in a dozen countries.
Spanish rights in Daniel Tammet’s Embracing The Wide Sky: The Enormous Potential of Your Mind and Thinking in Numbers.
Polish rights in Casey Watson’s fostering memoir Little Prisoners: A tragic story of two siblings trapped in a world of suffering and abuse
The documentary rights in Marina Chapman’s memoirs The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of the Girl Raised by Monkeys sold to Blink Films for a two hour National Geographic programme in the autumn.
Rights for a 90 minute tv drama in Neil McKenna’s Fanny & Stella, a tale of a pair of Victorian cross dressers , have been bought by Bentley Productions.
Recent Successes
The Favoured Daughter: One Woman's Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future by Fawzia Koofi and agency author Nadene Ghouri went to no 15 in the New York Times non-fiction e book best seller list.
Cathy Glass’s Cut was no 9 in the New York Times non-fiction e book best seller list.
David Haviland’s Why Was Queen Victoria Such A Prude?: …and other historical myths and follies a collection of surprising historical trivia, was selected for Amazon’s March promotion and went to no 1 in all its categories.
Kris Hollington and his co-author ‘Officer A’ (The Crime Factory) acted as story consultants for Noble Cause Corruption, a controversial new play for BBC Radio 4, broadcast on Tuesday 5 March.
Michael Jago’s The Man Who Was George Smiley: The Life of John Bingham was no 5 in the Heywood Hill non-fiction best seller list.
Andrew Lownie is one of six agents short-listed for this year’s The Bookseller Literary Agent Of The Year award. The winner will be announced at the Bookseller Industry awards on May 13th.
Ian Millthorpe and Lynne Barrett-Lee’s Mum's Way went to no 7 on the Sunday Times list and was serialised in The People.
The US edition of Clare Mulley’s The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville to be published in June, has been selected as one of Amazon’s Big Spring Books under biography .
Bijan Omrani had the cover story on Caesar’s invasion of Britain in the March Edition of Military History Monthly .
Andrew Lownie
Current Submissions
Bruce Allen’s A Line Drawn in Water the story of the 1565 Siege of Malta and epic fight between the Ottoman Empire and Knights of St John.
Hugh Barker’s gift book Gigantic: A Curious History Of Man and Elephant, an anecdotal history with each section telling the tale of a particular elephant, from Hattie the “best elephant in the world” to Lyuba the baby mammoth, and from Topsy, the killer elephant who was electrocuted by Thomas Edison to Hannibal’s favourite fighting elephant.
Anna Barrington’s vet memoir Get the Vet.
Henry von Blumenthal’s The Companion to British History the fourth edition of the largest single-volume encyclopaedia of British History ever written, and the only one compiled by a single author rather than a committee.
Dominic Carman’s Heads Up is a series of interviews arranged thematically with over thirty private school headmasters and headmistresses which gives a revealing insight into how they run their schools and the current state of the independent sector.
Adrian Clark’s filmic life of the gay art patron and collector and founder of the magazine Horizon and the ICA Peter Watson.
Peter Daughtrey's discovery of the lost city of Atlantis and The Silver City. US rights sold.
Gavin Evans's Gender Bender: men, women and evolutionary psychologists which sets out to show that male and female emotional and intellectual capacities are moulded more by culture than biology and Black brain, white brain which draws from recent discoveries in palaeontology, archaeology and biological anthropology to argue that race is useful as no more than a short-hand descriptive term and that the genetic differences between people from all over the world are miniscule compared with other species.
Eleanor Fitzsimons’s life of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first wife A Want of Honour: The Short Life and Tragic Death of Harriet Shelley
The doyen of UFO writers Timothy Good’s Earth: An Alien Enterprise. US rights sold.
Chloe Govan’s two biographies Amy Winehouse: The Untold Story and Psychoanalysing Russell Brand.
Ian Graham's Impostors which tells the stories of the boldest and most notorious impostors of the past 500 years. US rights sold .
Martin Hammond’s Ask a Silly Question: Messages from eBay's most troublesome customer, a collection of stupidly funny and completely genuine email exchanges between the quirky Fredrick Facedass and the online sellers of eBay.
The memoirs of singer Michelle Heaton Michelle Heaton: Survivor.
The life-affirming memoirs of actress, stand-up comic, escort girl, business-women and mother Bonnie Hibbs Bonnie.
Roger Howard’s Operation Damocles, the forgotten story of the former Nazi scientists who were recruited by Egypt in the 1950s and ‘60s to develop a long-range missile capable of striking Israel. US rights sold.
John Jobling's U2: The Goal is $oul, the first unauthorised biography of U2 to document and analyse their 35-year career objectively, going beyond the myth to present a fascinating warts-and-all portrait of the Irish rock band. US and Portuguese rights already sold.
One of the rarest documents in 20th century history: a Holocaust diary written in secret by a man who survived for six years in three of the Nazi regime’s most infamous concentration camps. Gustav Kleinmann : A concentration camp diary
House historian Ellen Leslie’s My House Used To Be A ….
David Long's Spy's London, a walking guide to the espionage capital of the world.
Debbie McDonald's The Mysterious Lives of Moura Budberg on the spy and lover of H G Wells and Maxim Gorky.
Chris Marinello's Art Hunter : Searching for the World’s Missing Masterpieces, the memoirs of the director of the Art Loss Register.
Paul Merrill’s humorous gift books Muddle Your Way Through Fatherhood: How to fool people into thinking you’re a great dad and Muddle Your Way Through Being a Grandparent: How to fool people into thinking you’re a great Granny or Gramps
The memoirs of female private investigator Gina Negus The Lady Detectives.
Elizabeth Norton’s biography of the mother of Anne Boleyn Elizabeth Boleyn.
Bijan Omrani’s Caesar's Footprints looking at Caesar’s legacy in Gaul and Britain.
Kathleen O’Shea’s memoir Little Drifters of an Irish travelling family in one of the infamous Magdalene laundries.
Jamie Pike's The Ultimate Guide to Filming Locations in New York City an illustrated walking tour of New York film scenes.
Former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope lifts the lid on a UFO incident that he and colleagues in the MoD regarded as being more significant and compelling than the Roswell incident in Rendezvous at Rendlesham
Foreign correspondent Ros Russell’s Burma's Spring relating Burma’s emergence from military dictatorship to freedom.
Vikie Shanks’s Unravelled memoirs of how she was left to bring up seven children, all on the autism spectrum and two with cerebral palsy, after her husband committed suicide.
Joff Sharpe’s business tips drawn from his service in the SAS Who Dares Wins in Business: Doing business the SAS way
Gary Smith’s Duped by Data a collection of dozens of examples of tortuous reasoning,
Mandy Smith’s Cabin Fever an exhilarating, and often hilarious, account of what it’s like to be a stewardess in the modern world of air travel.
Yinka Thomas’s revolutionary new The Konjac Diet a weight loss and weight management plan that incorporates what has been described as ‘the perfect food’ – Konjac.
Natacha Tormey’s memoir The Family: a childhood born into a religious cult.
Kerry Tyrrell-Parkes’s memoir Don't Call Me Madam about her double life of wedding photographer by day and owner of the North’s most successful escort agency by night.
Duncan Wade’s Ghosts of the Rhine about the American mistreatment of German POWs in 1945.
Caroline Young’s The Cool Guide to Edinburgh, the first in a proposed series revealing the coolest places in the city for visitors who want to discover what other guidebooks just don’t seem to cover.
David Haviland
Non-Fiction Submissions
Matt Shoard’s Thin Wild Mercury: The Voice of Bob Dylan, a collection of essays by Dylan fans including Paul Morley, George Galloway MP, and AL Kennedy.
Fiction Submissions
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.
Paul Callan’s The Dulang Washer, a powerful historical novel set in the tin mines of 19th century Malaya. Currently fourth favourite for the prestigious IMPAC Literary Award.
Casey Kelleher’s gritty sink estate crime novel, in the tradition of Martina Cole, Rise and Fall
Louisa Treger’s literary novel The Lodger, which tells the story of the passionate affair between writer Dorothy Richardson and H. G. Wells.
Mungo Lyon and the Adventure of the Double Headed Eagle, an old-fashioned spy thriller by Stephen O’Rourke, in the style of John Buchan.
Dominic Selwood’s The Sword Of Moses, an epic crypto-thriller in the style of Dan Brown, involving the Knights Templar, Nazis, and the Ark of the Covenant.
Forthcoming Books
The paperback of Nicholas Best’s Five Days That Shocked The World: An Oral History of Europe at the End of World War Two
The second in Malcolm Castle’s firefighing memoirs Great Bales of Fire
Marina Chapman’s The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of the Girl Raised by Monkeys
Kris Hollington’s Unthinkable: The Shocking Scandal of Britain's Trafficked Children
Robert Hutchinson’s Spanish Armada
David Long’s The Animals VC: For Gallantry and Devotion - The Authorised History of the PDSA Dickin Medal now called Animal Heroes.
Sean McMeekin’s July 1914: Countdown to War
Casey Watson’s Mummy's Little Helper: The heartrending true story of a young girl secretly caring for her severely disabled mother
Christian Wolmar’s Great Railway Revolution
Fifteen of the agency’s ghost writers have shared some tips on how they work with their subjects and what they believe is needed to ghost a successful book in Ghostly Reflections
Best wishes, Andrew Lownie and David Haviland
