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Canongate snaps up noir thriller by janitor
Canongate has acquired a noir thriller by Buenos Aires-based janitor and author K Ferrari.
Senior commissioning editor Hannah Knowles acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada to Like Flies from Afar from Devon Mazzone, director of subsidiary rights at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
It will be translated by Adrian Nathan West is a writer and literary critic based in Spain. Canongate will publish it in trade paperback, retailing at £12.99, on 24th March 2020.
The synopsis reads: “A profane and uproarious piece of hard-boiled noir, Like Flies from Afar follows Luis Machi, an unforgettably loathsome Argentinian oligarch, through 24 hours of his eventful life. He has a cocaine habit, a collection of 300 ties, ten million dollars in the bank… and a bloody corpse in the trunk of his BMW. Although Machi happily fraternises with the worst elements of society, the dead body is one of the few things he can truthfully claim to be innocent of.”
Like Flies from Afar is the first novel to be published in English by Ferrari who began his writing career while an undocumented immigrant in the US. Ferrari works as a janitor for the Buenos Aires metro at the Pasteur-Amia station on line B. In the 1990s, he was deported from the US where he and his wife were trying to find work.
“Like Flies from Afar demonstrates why K Ferrari is already an award-winning star of international crime fiction,” Canongate said. “A hardboiled noir thriller, a whodunit, a black comedy, and a filthy catalogue of the excesses of wealth, this is a Jim Thompson novel for the globalized world.”
Ferrari, who has written three novels, two collections of short fiction, and a book of nonfiction, said: “I look forward to the release of my novel, Like Flies from Afar, in the UK – and with such a prestigious publishing house as Canongate. I hope to reach many readers there soon.”
Knowles added: “I’m a sucker for a great noir thriller, and K Ferrari is an excitingly fresh voice in the genre. Like the best writers of noir, he uses the form to address the serious problems within society but never at the expense of a blistering plot and the sharpest of wise-cracks.”
