Bloomsbury falls for Lee-Kennedy’s ‘funny and warm’ début in six-way auction

Bloomsbury has won a six-way auction for Go Lightly, a love story and début novel by screenwriter Brydie Lee-Kennedy. 

Publishing director Emma Herdman acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada and including audio, from Imogen Pelham at Marjacq Scripts. North American rights were won by Mary Gaule at Harper Perennial, sold by Meredith Miller at UTA. It will publish in summer of 2024, backed by a “major” marketing and publicity campaign in the UK and Australia.

Go Lightly is the story of Ada, an Australian living in London eking out a living as a cabaret performer and part-time temp. “At a party on the last night of the Edinburgh Festival, she takes home fellow Australian Sadie, hoping for nothing more than a one-night stand,” the synopsis reads. “The next morning she gets a message from Stuart, an artist from Liverpool, who saw her show and became infatuated with her. 

“Ada will take everything life can give her, so as her relationships with both unexpectedly continue, she sees no reason to stop either one. But when Sadie and Stuart find out about each other, and as pressure from her family, bank and friendships pile up, she’s left asking: how long can you resist the inevitable? Go Lightly is full of tenderly observed skewerings of modern-day relationships and recognisable truths about friendship and love.”

Lee-Kennedy is an Australian TV writer living in London who has written on shows for Netflix, Apple TV and Disney. In a former life she was a cabaret performer, kids party entertainer and sex columnist for SBS Australia.

“It is a surreal pleasure and a wild honour to be publishing my début novel with Bloomsbury,” she said. “From our first meeting it was clear that Emma and her team were the perfect people to guide my work from a solitary act of hope into an actual physical book that eventually strangers will read. Thank you to my agent Imogen for patiently taking me through this very weird process and not blocking me on WhatsApp.”

Herdman said: “I love Brydie’s writing. It’s rare to come across a début that explores the gap between who we are and who we perform so subtly, wrapped up in a novel that’s funny and warm but wears these qualities so effortlessly – a testament to Brydie’s talent. I am overjoyed to be working with her, and not a little relieved that she chose Bloomsbury as her home, particularly as I may have been ostracised by colleagues the world over if she hadn’t.”

Pelham added: “Go Lightly is a joy of a novel, from start to finish, so it stands to reason the whole experience of working on it with Brydie has also been a joy from the get-go. I am thrilled that Go Lightly has found such a fantastic UK home with Emma and the hugely impressive wider Bloomsbury team.”