Allison & Busby signs Jody Cooksley’s The Small Museum

Allison & Busby has signed Jody Cooksley’s The Small Museum, winner of the Caledonia Novel Award. 

Susie Dunlop, publishing director, acquired world English-language rights for two novels from Charlotte Seymour at Johnson & Alcock.

The first, The Small Museum, is billed as “a chilling historical mystery” and will be published on 23rd May 2024.  

Set in London in 1873, the story follows Madeleine Brewster, "whose marriage to Dr Lucius Everley was meant to be the solution to her family’s sullied reputation”, the publisher said. “After all, Lucius is a well-respected collector of natural curiosities, his ’Small Museum’ of bones and things in jars is his pride and joy, although kept under lock and key. His sister Grace’s philanthropic work with fallen women is also highly laudable. However, Maddie is confused by and excluded from what happens in what is meant to be her new home.” 

The publisher continued: “Maddie’s skill at drawing promises a role for her though when Lucius agrees to let her help him in making a breakthrough in evolutionary science, a discovery of the first ’fish with feet’. But the more Maddie learns about both Lucius and Grace, the more she suspects that unimaginable horrors lie behind their polished reputations. Framed for a crime that would take her to the gallows and leave the Everleys unencumbered, Maddie’s only hope is her friend Caroline Fairly. But will she be able to put the pieces together before the trial reaches its fatal conclusion?” 

Cooksley said “I love strange, gothic and creepy tales and am inspired by such storytelling as a useful way to explore psychology and character motivation. The Victorian period is a real favourite as it allows more imaginative settings and ways for the reader to suspend their disbelief, but it’s a period that also carries many similarities to our own – their industrial revolution and our technological revolution are both contexts that have sparked a deep examination of the self, belief systems and the things that make us human.” 

Dunlop added: “It must have been fate – I had only just visited the curious Hunterian museum in Holborn, when Charlotte sent me Jody’s immensely accomplished novel. I couldn’t read it quickly enough and absolutely devoured every page. It is a perfect Gothic mystery, appealing equally to my love of Rebecca and Mantel’s The Giant O’Brien. I am delighted A&B get to present this award-winning story to the world.”