Indie Splice snaps up de Silva in two-book deal

Birmingham-based indie Splice has acquired an “expansive and intricately designed” novel from Mark de Silva in a two-book deal.

Commissioning editor Daniel Davis Wood acquired UK rights to The Logos from Justin Hargett of Kickflip PR, alongside de Silva’s debut Square Wave, first published in the USA by Two Dollar Radio in 2016. Both titles are scheduled for publication in 2021.

The Logos follows a freelance artist commissioned to run a publicity campaign for a company that seeks to fundamentally alter human perception.

Wood said: “I can’t think of a recent novel that matches The Logos for sheer ambition. Mark de Silva combines the dark moral outlook of Javier Marías, the pointed prose stylings of Don DeLillo, and an attention to the fine details of art unmatched by anyone since John Berger. The Logos will irreversibly warp the way its readers see the world, and especially the interplay between the pitiless forces of commerce and the blaze of true creativity.”

De Silva, a Cambridge University graduate, is fiction editor at 3:AM magazine, a former contributor to the New York Times and intern at the Paris Review. He currently lectures in philosophy at Oklahoma State University.

He said: “Imperial Britain played an outsize role in the Commercial Revolution and since I am of Sri Lankan extraction, Britain’s trade history on the Indian subcontinent sits at the centre of Square Wave. In The Logos, however, I want to re-examine commercial culture from a contemporary perspective. The iconography of advertising forms a lingua franca as powerful as the English language itself, and I hope to explore how it might serve as a reservoir of communal meanings no less vast or rich than any other in human history. I certainly believe that readers in the UK will recognise something of themselves in these books, which I couldn’t have written without spending some of the decisive years of my life in Britain.”