Fourth Estate signs O'Neill's contemporary political stories

Fourth Estate has acquired 11 political stories about “the way we live now” from Man Booker-longlisted author Joseph O’Neill.

The HarperCollins imprint's publishing director Nicholas Pearson acquired British Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights to Good Trouble as well as an untitled novel from Natasha Fairweather at Rogers, Coleridge and White.

The collection of stories spans “bourgeois facial hair trends” to parental sleep deprivation, exposing the “mysterious pettiness, the underlying violence and, sometimes, the surprising beauty of ordinary life”.

Stories from Good Trouble have appeared in the New Yorker and Harper’s among other publications, and the final story, 'The Sinking of the Houston', will appear in the New Yorker on Monday (23rd October). O'Neill's The Dog (Fourth Estate) was longlisted for the Man Booker in 2014.

Pearson said: “Contemporary life and its mesh of anxieties: it is all here in Joe's stories. As he had shown in his last two novels, Joe is one of our finest chroniclers of the way we live now. We are thrilled at the prospect of publishing this collection.”

Fourth Estate will publish Good Trouble in June 2018.