Carcanet bags Nobel-winner Glück's 'unique' first narrative prose work

Carcanet has acquired Nobel Prize-winner Louise Glück’s Marigold and Rose, "a new kind of creation myth" and her first work to be written in narrative prose.

The publisher acquired rights for the UK and Commonwealth, excluding Canada, from Luke Wylie at Ingram Agency. The book will publish on 27th October. 

The synopsis reads: "The twins, Marigold and Rose, in their first year of life, begin to piece together the world as they move between Mother’s stories of ‘Long, long ago’ and Father’s ‘Once upon a time’. A story about beginnings and endings, each of which is an ending of what has come before. There is comedy in the progression, the stages of recognition, and in the ironic anachronisms which keep the babies alert, surprised, prescient and resigned. Charming, resonant and written with Glück’s characteristic poise and curiosity, Marigold and Rose unfolds as a new kind of creation myth."

"Each of Louise’s books is a unique and wonderful surprise," said Michael Schmidt, m.d. at the press. "After the excitement of Winter Recipes from the Collective last October, we were quite unprepared for this work, in prose—a kind of prose we’d never seen before, out of the mouths of babes, the babes of the title, clear, truthful, without a trace of sentimentality. Innocent of the fall, as it were, a dialogue that made us relive, in our own ways, our own first years."

Glück is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a collection of essays and is a lecturer at Yale University. She has won a host of international awards including the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2015 National Humanities Medal and the 1993 Pulitzer Prize.