Chatto & Windus scoops 'major' new fiction series by Costa-winning novelist Segal

Chatto & Windus has scooped a new fiction series by Costa-winning novelist Francesca Segal.

Publishing director Clara Farmer acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for three books from Zoë Waldie at RCW. The first book, Welcome to Glorious Tuga, will be published in hardback, e-book and audiobook on 6th June 2024.

Moreover, Helen Atsma at Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins, will publish in the US on 2nd July 2024, and the TV rights have been sold in a "major" deal.

"A complete and vivid world to escape to, Welcome to Glorious Tuga celebrates a fictional island and the warm-hearted community who live there," the publisher’s summary says. "Enchanting, uplifting and very funny, this is a captivating novel about love, belonging and about what it really means to come home."

Segal is a journalist and the author of two novels, The Innocents (Vintage) and The Awkward Age (Vintage), and a memoir of NICU motherhood, Mother Ship (Vintage). Her writing has won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, a Betty Trask Award, and been longlisted for the Women’s Prize.

Farmer said: "We’re told we are in the Age of Exhaustion. So, a trilogy about an island paradise from a writer as exceptional as Francesca was something we all ran towards, arms outstretched."

Segal added: "The island of Tuga de Oro is the embodiment of my happy place – wide beaches and clear seas; coconut palms, and glorious sunshine, but above all else, when reality can feel so bleak, a place in which human kindness mostly triumphs and everyone is striving, more or less, to be the best version of themselves. Charlotte is a young community vet, trying to rescue a species, find her way in an isolated and highly eccentric tropical paradise, and maybe even find herself in the process."