Dead Ink buys Lee Rourke's 'Glitch'

Independent publisher Dead Ink will publish Lee Rourke’s third novel, Glitch, about a dramatic drop in cabin pressure on a man’s flight home from America.

The Liverpool-based press will publish the book about family, grief, and embracing “the recurring glitch” in October next year.

Dead Ink’s director Nathan Connolly acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for the book from Donald Winchester at Watson Little.

After two decades spent in the US, L-J is on a flight back to his native Suffolk to visit family and his childhood coastal home, the synopsis reads. His flight is straightforward until it hits a glitch – an unexpected and dramatic cabin decompression – which suggests that all that L-J expects from this trip cannot be counted on.

The novel “is a powerful novel of grief, family, and ideas,” the publisher said. “It’s a novel about embracing those irregularities – the recurring glitch – that seep into every aspect of life, and seeing the beauty in them.”

Rourke's debut The Canal (Melville House) won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize in 2010 with Vulgar Things published by 4th Estate in 2013. He is a contributing editor to 3AM Magazine and lectures in creative writing at Middlesex University. Rourke (pictured above signing the contract with his children) was born in Manchester and now lives in Essex.

“I first worked with Lee on our anthology, Know Your Place, and we immediately hit it off,” Connolly said. “We’re both from similar Manchester backgrounds and see completely eye-to-eye on publishing and literature. I’m really honoured to have Lee’s work represented by Dead Ink and I think this will be a great partnership.”