Canongate acquires a new novel by Serena author Rash

Canongate has acquired a new novel by Ron Rash, about "the bonds of friendship, the contradictions of family, and what it really means to love".

Jamie Byng, c.e.o., acquired UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights to The Caretaker from Beniamino Ambrosi on behalf of Adam Eaglin at the Cheney Agency. North American rights were sold to Lee Boudreaux at Penguin Random House US.

PRH US will publish in September 2023, with Canongate’s publication to follow in November 2023. French and Italian rights have been sold to Gallimard and Nuova Frontiera respectively by the Cheney Agency.

Set in 1951 Blowing Rock, North Carolina, it tells the story of Jacob Lampton, whose parents disinherited him when he married Naomi. After he leaves to fight in Korea, he entrusts her well-being to his friend Blackburn Gant.

Gant’s appearance has been "irrevocably altered" by childhood disease, the synopsis adds. Over time, "the two outcasts grow closer," until an act of deception derails all their lives.

Rash is the author of the PEN/Faulkner finalist Serena (Canongate/Ecco), as well as novels such as Above the Waterfall (Canonage/Ecco), The Cove (Canonage/Ecco/Thorndike Press) and One Foot in Eden (Picador US), among others. He has written five collections of poems and seven collections of stories, among them Burning Bright (Canongate/HarperCollins), which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories (St Martin’s Press), a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Three times the recipient of the O Henry Prize and winner of the 2014 Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, Rash teaches at Western Carolina University.

He said: "Over the years, Jamie Byng has not only been my editor but also become my friend, so I am delighted to be publishing another novel with Canongate."

Byng added: "Ron is one of the finest writers Canongate has ever published and so it is an enormous pleasure to be publishing his first novel in seven years. And from the opening pages of The Caretaker, I knew I was back in the hands of a supremely skilled storyteller whose ability to populate communities with utterly convincing, beautifully observed and deeply complex characters is up there with Alice Munro, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Claire Keegan. Ron has written another gut punch of a novel, a love story against the odds that is also a hugely satisfying read."