Bret Easton Ellis moves to Swift Press with first novel in 13 years

Swift Press has scooped The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis, the American Psycho author’s first novel in 13 years.

Publisher Mark Richards acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown, on behalf of Amanda Urban at ICM. The Shards will publish globally on 17th January 2022. Ellis was previously published by Picador in the UK.

Set in the LA of the early 1980s, the novel revolves around a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

"Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past," the synopsis explains. "Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends, even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equalled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence."

Ellis is the author of six novels, including Less Than Zero and American Psycho (both published by Pan Macmillan), a collection of essays and short of stories. His work has been translated into 32 languages, and he has sold 705,120 UK copies for £5.3m in the Nielsen BookScan era, which began in 1998.

Richards said: "The Shards is everything you could hope for from a Bret Easton Ellis novel; in it, he takes the setting of Less Than Zero, the metafictional set-up of Lunar Park and the animating horror of American Psycho, and reworks them into something new and brilliant – a novel that is a coming-of-age masterpiece, channelling teenage desire and sexuality into a book that also reflects the changes that the culture has undergone in the past 40 years. It’s been a long time since his last novel, but The Shards is more than worth the wait. We at Swift are thrilled to be publishing it, and we look forward to it reaching his legions of existing fans, as well as many new ones."