Sara O'Connor, Editorial Director of Hot Key Books has acquired UK and BC rights (excluding Canada) to three books in Edward Carey's new IREMONGER trilogy, which in the vein of Neil Gaiman, Roald Dahl or Mervyn Peake, will work for young and old alike.
Novelist, visual artist and playwright Edward Carey is the author of two acclaimed novels, published in many countries around the world. OBSERVATORY MANSIONS was shortlisted for the Borders Discover New Writers Award and ALVA AND IRVA was longlisted for the 2005 IMPAC Literary Award. Both were accompanied by artworks by the author.
The IREMONGER TRILOGY takes readers into 'a stunning, dark world full of striking characters and so much heart. ' says Sara O'Connor, adding: 'We loved it at first sight'. HEAP HOUSE is set in Filching, an imaginary borough of Victorian London world where the Iremonger family ('kings of mildew, moguls of mould') make a fortune from junk. Young Clod Iremonger is about to be unwillingly betrothed to his Cousin Pinalippy when he meets orphan girl Lucy Pennant and family secrets begin to unfold.
Edward Carey says: "I am so happy that Hot Key with all its passion and brilliance are taking on the Iremongers, it's absolutely the perfect home for them. I can't wait."
"Hot Key's offer came in with such vigour and imagination, an excellent match for Edward's marvellous work," says Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann. "I'm thrilled that Sara O'Connor, Sarah Odedina and the whole Hot Key team fell in love with Clod & Lucy as they did. It's the agency's first deal with Hot Key, and I look forward to seeing their innovative and energetic publishing in action in bringing Edward Carey's writing to a new array of fans."
The first title, HEAP HOUSE, will be published in September 2013, to be followed by FILCHING and LUNGDON.
Italian rights in all three titles were sold on the Friday before the Frankfurt Book Fair to Bompiani.
Click here and here to read more on the deal.
Praise for Edward Carey:
'Edward Carey is an enormously talented writer…' - Publishers Weekly
'Edward Carey is one of the strangest writers we are privileged to have in this country. There are echoes in his work of other great idiosyncratics from Angela Carter to Russell Hoban, but he supersedes even them in the downright oddity of his mind.' - Observer
'Edward Carey is a writer whose books confound and amaze me. …He's brilliant and precocious and spectacularly imaginative.' - Katharine Weber, The Readerville Journal
'Carey writes with such persuasive authority, and we are inclined to believe him …The emphasis on detail in Carey's sweetly detached, exact prose has forebears in the illuminated dreams of Borges and Calvino and Georges Perec.' - Carey Harrison, The New York Times Review of Books