Canongate scoops Haworth's debut novel about 'memory, politics, remembrance' 

Canongate has scooped Monumenta, Lara Haworth’s debut novel that "compellingly and playfully explores themes of memory, politics, remembrance".

Ellah Wakatama, editor-at-large, acquired world rights from Jo Bell at Bell Lomax Moreton and will publish in June 2024.

Monumenta tells the story of a family’s reunion at their childhood home in Serbia. The house has been requisitioned to make way for a monument to a massacre, except the owner, Pava Babic, does not know which one. The synopsis said: "Belgrade’s council tell her three different architects are coming to pitch for the job. Each wishes to construct a different monument, memorialise a different massacre.

"Pava can’t let the house go, not until she reunites her children for one final dinner and secures the secrets these architects threaten to unearth. Her aspirational, distant daughter, Hilde, and her secretly queer son, Danilo, both reluctantly agree to fly home to Belgrade. Here, their lives will intersect in disconcerting and surprising ways with those of the architects, their mother and the house."

Haworth is a writer, filmmaker and political researcher specialising in the UK’s move to become carbon zero by 2050. She won a Bridport prize for a Monumenta extract that she turned into a short story, and has been awarded a prize for her poem ‘The Thames Barrier’ in the Café Writers Poetry Competition. Her writing workshop, "Letters That Will Never Be Sent", was featured in a BBC World Service documentary.

She said: "When I started to write Monumenta in 2020, everyone was fighting over monuments. This conflict and confusion runs through the novel, but on a smaller, domestic scale I wanted to show a family engaged in a similar struggle over their story, truth, secrets and the past. At its heart, Monumenta asks if all family homes are in fact monuments to their own griefs, joys, sorrows and emotional massacres – and what these homes, these monuments, do to us when we live with them and when we let them go.

"It is beyond my wildest fantasies that Canongate have picked up my debut, having admired them as a publisher for as long as I can remember. It will be the privilege of my life to work with the frankly iconic Ellah Wakatama to bring this book out into the world."

Wakatama added: "Monumenta introduces the gorgeous and exacting imagination of Lara Haworth. As she dissects the very particular unhappiness of a single, fractured family, her novel excavates the burden of secrets and turbulent past of a house, and a nation, steeped in blood.

"I read this submission in one sitting and was stunned by Haworth’s ability to interrogate complex relationships – challenging her readers to make connections beyond the boundaries of their own lived experiences. I am excited about her career and I’m honoured to be her debut publisher."