Fern Press pre-empts ‘groundbreaking revisionist history of Europe’ by Samuel Agbamu 

Fern Press has pre-empted White Lie: The Discovery of Europe by classicist and lecturer Samuel Agbamu. UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, were bought from Tom Killingbeck at A M Heath, for publication in spring 2027. Rights sold to Basic Books (US) at auction and to Bollati Boringhieri (Italy) in a further pre-empt. 

“The first decades of the 21st Century have seen the European dream take nightmarish turns,” the publisher said. “Brexit, ‘Fortress Europe’ and the conflict in Ukraine have shattered the illusion of Europe as an idyll. In this moment of reckoning for the continent, a very simple but crucial question is rarely, if ever, asked: what is Europe and who are the Europeans?” 

In White Lie, Agbamu tells the story of Europe over the course of almost 3,000 years, “showing how the idea of Europe came to be aligned with ideas of whiteness, a continent defined against those who were perceived as not European, as not white” the synopsis reads. “White Lie shows how these historical and ongoing negotiations about who is included and excluded from Europe, who is European and who is not, fundamentally shaped and shapes global ideas of race.” 

Agbamu said: “Recent events across the world have forced us to think carefully about how ideas of whiteness, Europe and the West interact. As a classicist, I feel especially strongly about excavating the roots of white, ’western’ identities that often base themselves on particular perspectives of Ancient Greece and Rome. I am thrilled to be working with the Fern Press team to bring White Lie to a wide readership.” 

Agbamu is a lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading, where he teaches courses on Latin literature and language, Roman history and on race in antiquity. He has written for the Times Literary Supplement and has appeared on BBC Radio 4. His monograph, Restorations of Empire in Africa, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in March 2024.