S&S 'spellbound' by Smith's Cold People

Simon & Schuster UK has landed Tom Rob Smith’s "utterly gripping" novel Cold People in a two-book deal.

Publishing in September 2022, the novel is a futuristic thriller about an Antarctic colony of global apocalypse survivors, trying to reinvent civilization under the most extreme conditions imaginable. Cold People will be published in conjunction with Scribner in the US, the first in a two-book deal, negotiated in the UK by Curtis Brown and in the US by Mitch Hoffman of the Aaron Priest Literary Agency.

"We are thrilled to partner with Scribner," said Suzanne Baboneau, m.d. of the Adult Publishing Division, and Smith's long-time UK editor. "This is an utterly gripping novel about separation and survival, about the many facets of love, and a sense of life renewing itself but at a terrible price, written with verve and compassion. It is a work of fiction that breaks rules, takes risks and plays on our increasing fears that the world may not last as it is."

Colin Harrison, Scribner’s editor-in-chief, said: "Tom Rob Smith has a remarkable ability to invent worlds that are different from ours yet complete and intimately knowable. We fell spellbound into Cold People, gripped by Tom’s vivid imagination, crystalline prose, and vision of the future."

Smith's novel, Child 44 (S&S), the first of the Child 44 trilogy, was adapted for a film starring Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman. His fourth novel, The Farm (S&S) was a number one Sunday Times paperback bestseller. He was the executive producer and writer of the 2018 second season of FX’s series "The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story", for which he won an Emmy Award. He is also the creator, writer and executive producer of a new show, "Class of 09", to be aired on FX in autumn 2022.

"Written in part during the pandemic lockdown, when books were an escape, I wanted to write a story that is as emotional as it is exciting, as epic as it is personal," he said of Cold People. "My extraordinary editor Suzanne Baboneau guided this novel into existence, and I’m delighted to call Simon & Schuster UK and Scribner in the US my publishing homes."