Canongate signs psychoanalyst's 'absorbing' title

Canongate has signed an "utterly absorbing and original" literary non-fiction title by psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman.

Hannah Knowles, Canongate senior commissioning editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights in An Unexplained Death by Brottman from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein.

When the body of a missing man, an apparent suicide,​ is discovered in the Belvedere building, resident Mikita Brottman becomes obsessed with the mysterious circumstances of his death. The Belvedere, which ​dates​ back to Baltimore’s Golden Age, is ​an old hotel since converted into flats. Brottman spends a decade investigating​ the case of the dead man, and as she does so, she gradually becomes haunted by the strange and violent secrets of the Belvedere’s past.​

Brottman is a writer and a professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art in downtown Baltimore. She is also a certified psychoanalyst. She lives in the old Belvedere Hotel in Mount Vernon, Baltimore.

Brottman said: "Canongate has a reputation for daring, edgy books – literary non-fiction, like the work of Geoff Dyer, as well as David Simon’s Baltimore-based true-crime books. I could not be more excited to see An Unexplained Death in this list of incredible publications."

Knowles said: "An Unexplained Death is a completely compulsive, shadowy intrigue of a book, with the razor-sharp Brottman as narrator leading the reader off on her rabbit-hole-filled, obsessive investigation."

Canongate will publish An Unexplained Death in hardback format on 1st November 2018.