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The Borough Press has triumphed in a four-way auction for cultural critic Charlotte Runcie’s “conversation starting” début novel about an actress who turns the tables on a misogynistic critic.
Commissioning editor Amy Perkins bought UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada for Bring the House Down, and another title, from Rachel Yeoh at the Madeleine Milburn Agency. The first book is slated for a spring 2025 publication date.
North American rights went to Cara Reilly at Doubleday, also at auction. The Penguin Random House division will be publishing alongside Penguin Canada for whom Nicole Winstanley and Meredith Pal acquired the titles. Translation rights for two international territories followed quickly after the Anglophone deals, with Piper winning at auction in Germany and Bompiani pre-empting in Italy.
Bring The House Down is set during “the annual tinderbox” of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and it opens on the night prominent theatre critic Alex Lyons files a brutal review for struggling actress Hayley Sinclair’s one-woman show. Later that same evening, chance brings them together in a bar and they go home together. Hayley has no idea who Alex is, while Alex is aware he has likely just ended her career.
When the review is published the next morning, Hayley responds to this humiliation by revamping her show into a one-star review of how Alex has treated women his entire life, including nightly guest appearances from his ex-girlfriends. The show “quickly becomes a sensation, sparking a long-awaited reckoning for misogyny in media and arts”.
Perkins called Runcie’s novel a “hugely wise and yet devastatingly funny book that entirely takes the reader by surprise through its flawed and yet painfully relatable characters. I know it’ll be a huge conversation starter in 2025”.
Edinburgh-born Runcie is the Daily Telegraph’s radio columnist and as an arts journalist she has written for a number of national newspapers. Her fiction—writing as Charlotte Imrie—was longlisted for the 2023 Bridport and the Lucy Cavendish prizes; she has garnered laurels for her poetry, winning the Tower Poetry Prize, and is a former Foyle Young Poet of the Year. Her narrative non-fiction title of women, art and the sea, Salt on Your Tongue, was published by Canongate in 2019.
Runcie added: “I’m thrilled to be working with Amy Perkins at The Borough Press. Amy is a brilliantly clever, witty and insightful editor who has blown me away with her response to this story, and I can’t imagine a more perfect UK home for the novel. Likewise my extraordinary agent, Rachel Yeoh, and everyone at Madeleine Milburn Agency, have believed in this book from the start, and I can never thank them enough.”