Icon signs trio of memoirs for 2020

Icon Books has snapped up three "very different but equally compelling memoirs" for 2020. 

Icon Books plans to build on the success of Helen Russell’s The Year of Living Danishly and Harry Leslie Smith’s Harry’s Last Stand, with three new memoirs to be published in the first half of next year.

Duncan Heath, Icon’s Publisher, said: "We are delighted to be publishing these three very different but equally compelling memoirs. I think there is a big appetite among the reading public for books about the lives of so-called “ordinary people”, and in their own individual ways these authors will appeal to that taste."

First to come is Liquid Gold by Roger Morgan-Grenville. The wryly comic story of a man who decides in his late 50s to take up beekeeping, it is also a "surprisingly moving account of how contact with nature fills a mid-life gap in his existence", said Icon. Duncan Heath bought world rights from Clare Grist Taylor for an undisclosed sum. Icon will publish in March.

Enid Elliott Linder’s We Learnt About Hitler at the Mickey Mouse Club, a touching autobiographical account of a 1930s childhood in London in the run-up to war, by the daughter of a butler and a ladies’ maid will follow in June. Commissioning Editor Tom Webber bought world rights directly from a family member of the author. 

The third memoir, The Boy with Two Hearts, an inspirational refugee story by Hamed Amiri, detailing through the eyes of a child the long and dangerous journey from Afghanistan to save his ill brother’s life will also publish in June. Editor Ellen Conlon bought world rights directly from the author.