Two from Moshfegh for Cape

Jonathan Cape has bought two books by Ottessa Moshfegh, winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize.

Deputy publishing director Robin Robertson bought the books from Anna Webber at United Agents, representing Bill Clegg at The Clegg Agency.

The first book, a novel called Eileen, is set outside Boston in the last weeks of 1964. It follows a “lonely young woman who falls into an obsessive friendship with a magnetic new colleague at the boys' prison where she works and finds herself pulled into a strange crime”. It was sold to Penguin Press in the US at auction.

Moshfegh’s second book is a collection of stories. There is no publication date yet for either book.

Moshfegh won the Plimpton Prize, given for fiction, to a new voice published in the Paris Review, in 2013.

Image by Krystal Griffiths