Ravi Mirchandani scales first Summit with six-figure pre-empt, as deals fall across the globe

Ravi Mirchandani has made his first acquisition at Summit Books, a six-figure pre-empt for Harvard professor Tara K Menon’s "propulsive" debut.

This is the initial buy for the Summit publisher who, after a decade at Picador, joined the UK arm of the Simon & Schuster imprint in September when it was revived on both sides of the Atlantic. Mirchandani acquired UK, Commonwealth and translation rights to Menon’s Under Water from Sebastian Godwin at David Godwin Associates. Separately, North American rights were sold by Godwin to Becky Saletan at Riverhead.

Under Water is described as a "striking novel reckoning with grief, trauma and the convulsions of nature", which charts female friendship across two seismic events: the tsunami of 2004 in Thailand and the arrival of Hurricane Sandy in Manhattan in 2012.

S&S’s adult rights team of Amy Fletcher and Ben Phillips have inked 11 deals in the two weeks since the book’s acquisition, including to DuMont (Germany), Anaya (Spain), Grasset (France) and Ambo Anthos (the Netherlands). An auction was underway in Italy as The Bookseller Daily went to press.  

India-born and Singapore-raised Menon lived in New York for a decade and currently resides in Massachusetts, where she is a Harvard assistant professor in the university’s department of English. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Nation and the Paris Review.

Mirchandani said he was "overjoyed" that the "deeply moving and beautifully written" Under Water was kickstarting the Summit UK list. He added: "It is rare to come across a debut that is quite so confidently well-achieved."

Menon added: "Under Water is a story of friendship and grief, but it is also fundamentally about ecological change and natural disasters. It is a meditation on who and how we grieve, and a love letter to the disappearing coral reefs and dying forests."

Mirchandani was appointed by S&S to launch Summit Books into the UK market. In tandem, Summit in the US—formerly home to authors such as Marilyn French and James Baldwin—was revived by publisher Judy Clain, 33 years after it last published original titles. In Australia and New Zealand, the imprint is being launched under Jane Palfreyman who, like Mirchandani, has previously worked at Picador.