Allen Lane scoops Gladwell's latest book

Allen Lane will publish Malcolm Gladwell’s first book for six years, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know in September. 

Gladwell will ask how we make sense of the unfamiliar. It all starts with a young black woman named Sandra Bland who was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas in July 2015, the synopsis from the Penguin Press imprint reads. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. What went wrong? 

"Through a series of puzzles, encounters and misunderstandings, from little-known stories to infamous legal cases, Gladwell takes us on a journey through the unexpected,” the publisher said. "He tells the stories of the spy who spent years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the man who saw through the fraudster Bernie Madoff, the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath and the false conviction of Amanda Knox. Strangers are never simple.”

Penguin Press publishing director Helen Conford bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Tina Bennett of William Morris Endeavor and publication is slated for September 10th 2019.

Conford said of Gladwell’s first book for six years: “Publishing Malcolm Gladwell is to be reminded what genius looks like. In Talking to Strangers he sets out to understand why we act the way we do, and how we all might know a little more about those we don’t. This promises to be a great experience for everyone, those who have read Malcolm Gladwell since the beginning and those who are meeting him afresh.”

Gladwell is the author of five international bestsellers: The Tipping Point (Little, Brown), Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath (all published by Penguin). He is the host of the podcast "Revisionist History" and is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He was born in England but grew up in rural Ontario and now lives in New York.