Bloomsbury YA acquires second title from Sutcliffe

Bloomsbury YA has acquired William Sutcliffe's The Summer We Turned Green, a "warm, witty comedy about the unlikeliest of eco-warriors" and the importance of the climate crisis. 

The synopsis reads: "It’s the summer holidays, and 13-year-old Luke has just had his life turned upside down. First his older sister Rose moved 'across the road’ – where a community of climate rebels are protesting the planned airport expansion – and now his dad’s gone too. Dad only went to get Rose back, but he’s out there building totem poles out of old furniture and wearing sandals and drinking mead (whatever that is) with the best of them... Luke is determined to save his dad, his sister and his summer. So how does he find himself at the top of a tree refusing to leave until the bulldozers stand down?"

Hannah Sandford, senior commissioning editor, bought world rights all languages (excluding Germany) from Felicity Rubinstein at Lutyens & Rubinstein. Publication is slated for July 2021. 

Bloomsbury published Sutcliffe's first YA title, The Gifted, the Talented and Me in 2019. It was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize 2020 and was the Sunday Times Children's Book of the Year 2019.

Sandford said: "We’re tremendously proud to be publishing The Summer We Turned Green. It is rare to read a book that is genuinely laugh-out-loud, tears-in-your-eyes funny, but rarer still for it to be combined with such an emotive and heartfelt call to action. Will has achieved it. Prepare to want to go out and tie yourself to a tree the moment you’ve finished reading it."

Sutcliffe, who has also written 13 novels for adults, commented: "When my teenage son began to take part in the school strikes for the climate, I talked to him and his friends about the issue, and was struck by the urgency and passion felt almost universally by young people about this subject. This generation know in their hearts that they will face the consequences of climate change, and they feel this in a visceral way, much more powerfully than the generations that have preceded them. These conversations made me want to write a book about the energy, zeal and exuberance of the protest movement against climate change – a novel that looks at this issue not through dire and terrifying dystopian warnings, but as a homage to the brave and often eccentric people who are devoting their lives to the fight to save humanity from itself."