Fig Tree lands 'audacious' novel from Hope

Fig Tree has landed an "audacious" and "profoundly humane" new novel from Anna Hope, author of Wake, The Ballroom and Expectation (Transworld).

Helen Garnons-Williams, publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to The White Rock from Caroline Wood at Felicity Bryan Associates. The White Rock will publish as a lead hardback in August 2022. French rights have sold to Le Bruit du Monde in a significant deal, German rights to Hanser Verlag, and Dutch rights to Ambo Anthos via Andrew Nurnberg Associates.

The publisher described the novel as "an audacious, intimate, profoundly humane novel about four people across three centuries, caught up in the tides of history and drawn to the same sacred place, in a mesmerising narrative of sacrifice and survival, chaos and connection". It is set around the White Rock of San Blas off the coast of Mexico, and moves between 2020, 1969, 1907 and 1775, "telling the stories of an English woman whose faith in her marriage, and the future itself, is unravelling; of an American singer on the run from the law, from himself and from a nation burning with the fever of the Vietnam War; of a Yoeme girl torn from her homeland in the name of progress; and of a young lieutenant of the Spanish line as he prepares to continue the conquest of the Pacific coast".

Garnons-Williams said: "Anna Hope’s many fans will already be aware of what a beautiful writer and an extraordinarily skilful storyteller she is. We couldn’t be more excited to be publishing this dazzling and deeply moving novel at Fig Tree: a novel of lives echoing through time, of the many forms of violence and love and what happens when the stories we have lived by can no longer keep us safe."

Hope added: "The White Rock is an intensely personal novel for me: I wrote the bulk of it during the first lockdown when, like many other people, I was counting my blessings, questioning my priorities and dealing with loss. To be published by Fig Tree and Helen Garnons-Williams —an editor with such vision, passion and integrity—feels like a gift."