Doubleday pre-empts 'singular, smart and subversive' debut from K Chiucarello

Doubleday has pre-empted the "singular, smart and subversive" debut from K Chiucarello. Senior commissioning editor Bobby Mostyn-Owen pre-empted UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to Nanny Nanny from Claire Roberts at Claire Roberts Global on behalf of Emma Dries at Triangle House. Doubleday will publish in hardback in 2026. Deborah Ghim pre-empted for Ecco in North America.

The synopsis reads: "As Nanny Nanny opens, our narrator is sitting with friends in a bar waiting for a call from her first love. She has been struck with a deep desire to carry a child and this may be the solution: years ago, she made a pact with her teenage sweetheart that if neither found another partner, they would one day marry and have a baby. She lays out five distinct reasons over drinks while she awaits the call. But each reason opens a door to the past—to the years she spent moving in and out of her first love’s orbit, to the children she has cared for as a career nanny as if they were her own, to the abusive relationship with another woman that she barely survived—revealing a complex tangle of thrill and pain, joy and despair which has led her to this moment."

Chiucarello is a writer, editor and tutor living in the Catskills, New York. Their work has appeared in Shenandoah, Epiphany, Longleaf Review, LitHub, Hobart and elsewhere. In 2021 they were named a Tin House scholar and in 2023 their essay Water Works was selected as a Notable in Best American Essays.