Viking wins LBF hot debut

Viking has won the nine-way publisher auction in the UK for London Book Fair buzzed-about book, 28-year-old Emma Healey’s debut novel Strange Companions.

Publishing director Venetia Butterfield [pictured] acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, in the title, from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown, with four publishers meeting the author in the final round of the contest.

The narrative is told through the eyes of Maud, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. She is perplexed to keep finding notes in her pockets with the message “Elizabeth is missing” scrawled on them. Maud tries to find her vanished friend, even as she cannot remember the faces of her own family, and the novel is described by the agent as “both a fast-paced mystery and a moving meditation on memory and identity”.

Butterfield said: “For me, it’s all about the voice of Maud. It is really exceptional. Like with Mark Haddon, Emma has really created this voice that allows you to understand what the character is experiencing; she has Alzheimer’s, but you are truly there with her. The novel is sad, funny, touching, and also kind of scary.”

She added that Viking had asked 15 people within the company, including Penguin m.d. Tom Weldon, to scribble handwritten notes explaining why they had loved the novel, and had presented them to the author during the process of bidding in a box which also included objects significant to the story such as a compact, tea cups and a senior person’s bus pass.

Viking will publish in June next year, and is currently considering whether to change its title. Meanwhile, Curtis Brown has sold rights in territories around the world, including to HarperCollins in the US, Knopf in Canada, and with translation rights sold in Germany to Luebbe, French rights to Sonatine, Dutch rights to de Boekerij, all at auction, as well as to Mondadori in Italy, People’s Press in Denmark, and Epsilon Yayincilik in Turkey. Further offers are pending from publishers in Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Spain and Taiwan.