Riverrun picks up 'subversive' tale from Vaye Watkins

Riverrun has acquired Claire Vaye Watkins’ I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, a "subversive" novel narrated by a woman experiencing post-partum depression during a publicity tour which takes her back to the places of her childhood. 

Jon Riley, publisher, snapped up UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) from Caspian Dennis on behalf of the Aragi Agency. Digital and trade paperback editions will be published in October 2021 to coincide with Riverhead’s publication in the USA. Riverrun will publish the novel in hardback as its literary lead in January 2022.

Riley said: "In the decade since her prizewinning, original take on the American West in Battleborn, to the climate emergency-inspired dystopia of her first novel Gold Fame Citrus and now, her subversion of the personal in I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, Claire Vaye Watkins’ voice has become one of the most urgent and unsettling in contemporary fiction."

Vaye Watkins is the author of the novel Gold Fame Citrus (rriverrun) and the short story collection Battleborn (Granta), winner of the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. 

She commented: "I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is a book about the problem of female freedom. I wanted to update the blueprint for female freedom, to let Claire find the peace female characters are ultimately denied. I rewilded her."