Caesar’s ‘heart-wrenching’ Second World War history goes to W&N in 12-way auction

Journalist Ed Caesar’s The Comet, described as a “heart-wrenching” Second World War history, has gone to W&N in a 12-way auction.

Publishing director Ed Lake acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Karolina Sutton at CAA. US rights sold to Ryan Doherty at Celadon at auction by Sloan Harris at CAA. Dutch rights went to Holland Diep, Polish rights to Marginesy, both by Claire Nozieres and Zoe Willis at CAA. W&N will publish in hardback, audio and e-book in spring 2025. 

Caesar is a contributing staff writer at the New Yorker. His previous books are Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon and The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War and Everest (Viking).

Of The Comet the publisher says: “Drawing on extensive ground-breaking research in never-before explored archives, The Comet will tell the story of perhaps the greatest escape service of the Second World War.”

It started on a summer’s day in northern Spain, 1941, when a slight young woman with piercing blue eyes appeared in the British consulate in Bilbao with an astonishing tale, W&N said. On paper, she was Denise Lacroix, a 17-year-old French student living in Bayonne. In reality, she was 24 years old, and from Brussels. Her name was Andrée de Jongh, though everybody called her “Dédée”.

Two weeks earlier, she said, she had started her journey in Brussels with two Belgian soldiers and a Scottish infantryman who had been left behind in Belgium after Dunkirk. The three men were now with her in northern Spain. A line of resistants and ordinary civilians had helped hide and move the group along their journey. They used forged papers and disguises, travelling by train through Nazi-occupied Belgium and France, lodging at safe houses, staggering through the dangers of the Pyrenees into Spain.

What Dédée was describing, although it was not yet so called, was the Comet Line. Assisting the escape of Allied airmen and soldiers was the single most dangerous activity a civilian in occupied Europe could undertake. A senior British intelligence officer estimated that for every man who made it home, somebody who helped him was killed. Such was the value of trained men to the Allied war effort that even this risk was worth it.

Against such terrible odds, the Comet Line would rescue some 800 Allied evaders in a little more than three years – led, and inspired, by Dédée herself. The Comet is the story of her heroism, and its cost. It is also a story about love and faith; about betrayal; and about how, in one of the darkest moments in Europe’s history, a small group of resistants kept a flame alive.

Lake said: “We are beyond thrilled to bring Ed Caesar, one of British journalism’s subtlest and most gifted storytellers, to W&N, and we couldn’t be more excited to help him bring Dédée to the world. Drawing on Ed’s ongoing archival discoveries and giving his extraordinary narrative powers their most heart-wrenching subject yet, The Comet really does promise to be a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Caesar said: "The story of the Comet Line – one of courage, survival, and the bonds we forge in the furnace of war – thrills me. The team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson immediately saw the power in Dédée’s tale, and I’m delighted that they will publish The Comet."