Chatto & Windus signs ‘magnificent’ debut from LRB editor Crewe in two-book deal

Chatto & Windus has pre-empted a “magnificent and daring” debut novel from Tom Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, in a two-book deal.

Clara Farmer, publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Peter Straus at RCW. First book The New Life will be published on 19th January 2023. 

The New Life tells the story of two Victorian marriages: that of John Addington, who although married to Catherine, has spent his life trying to navigate his desires for men, and Henry Ellis, whose wife Edith has fallen in love with Angelica. When John and Henry decide to write a book together, arguing against the criminalisation of male homosexuality, they throw themselves and all those around them into jeopardy. 

Farmer said: “The New Life is a gorgeously achieved novel, filled with fin de siècle beauty and romance, set against the riveting backdrop of the Oscar Wilde trial. Delving into the hidden dynamics of two marriages – each one an unexpected love triangle – it is an astonishing and invigorating novel about breaking convention in late Victorian England. Tom is an extraordinary novelist, with the ability to seduce his readers utterly – plus he has written possibly the best opening scene of all time.”

Crewe said: “The New Life is the book I knew I wanted to write long before I actually wrote it. I hope it reveals to readers an unfamiliar Victorian England that will surprise and provoke, inhabited by a generation in the process of discovering the nature and limits of personal freedom, struggling to create a better world as the 20th-century comes into view. I am delighted to be working with Clara and with Chatto, a legendary publishing imprint whose books my characters would have been reading 130 years ago.” 

Nan Graham and Sally Howe at Scribner will publish in the USA and Canada, De Arbeiderspers in the Netherlands, Grasset in France, Suhrkamp in Germany and Enciclopèdia Catalana in Spain.