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Fourth Estate has scooped Clean, an "electrifying" new novel from International Booker Shortlisted author Alia Trabucco Zerán in a "heated" six-way auction.
Publishing director Kishani Widyaratna acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, in the English Language, including physical, digital and audio, from Laurence Laluyaux at RCW. North American rights went to Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead Books and rights have sold in 16 further territories, including China, Sweden, the Netherlands and France.
The book will be translated by Booker International shortlisted translator Sophie Hughes and publish in hardback in the UK in June 2024. It begins with the death of a girl and the synopsis says: "Estela, a nanny to a wealthy, middle class family speaks from a locked room. As the hours slip by, she tells us of the events that led to this moment, how she felt torn between her working life in the city and the memory of her home in the south, between her disgust for her ostentatious employers – at whose hands she suffers a litany of indignities – and her unsolved affection for them and for the young daughter being raised in their image."
It adds: "Disturbing, profound and impossible to put down, Clean explores domestic work, class and violence against the backdrop of Chile’s changing political landscape."
Zerán was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University and she holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies from University College London. Her debut novel, The Remainder (And Other Stories) was chosen by El País as one of its top 10 debuts of 2015 and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2019. Her non-fiction title, When Women Kill (And Other Stories) won for the British Academy Book Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for the National Books Critics Circle Criticism Award, and film rights have been sold to Fabula, part of Netflix.
The translator, Hughes, has translated all three of Zerán’s books to English, as well as works by Fernanda Melchor, Enrique Vila-Matas and others. Her translations have been longlisted and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, won the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize and been shortlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award.
Widyaratna said: "Clean is a lightning bolt of a novel that grips from the very first page and leaves you reeling with its searing exploration of class, domestic work and gender. It pushes us to examine our bonds to one another, and the ways in which those bonds are warped by relations of labour, class and, most unsettlingly, care. Sophie Hughes’ translation is a joy to read."
Trabucco Zerán added: "A book needs to find its readers. Otherwise, it is somehow unfinished, incomplete. And an editor is one of the key people who makes that encounter, between a reader and a book, not only possible but timely and meaningful. I am confident Kishani Widyaratna’s vision of Clean and of literature will be crucial in making that connection significant, and I am looking forward to working closely with the wonderful Fourth Estate team."