Fourth Estate signs debut Dunlay in 'significant' two-book deal

Fourth Estate has signed Teddy by début novelist Emily Dunlay in a “significant” two-book deal.

Editorial director Katie Bowden secured UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Katie Greenstreet at Paper Literary. North American rights were sold to Harper v.p. and executive editor Sara Nelson. HarperCollins US and UK will collaborate to deliver a major global publication, the publisher said. Publication date has not been scheduled. 

Set in 1960s Rome, Teddy tells the story of the wayward wife of an American diplomat as she tries with increasing desperation to contain a scandal from her past. She fears its discovery will be her ruin. 

Bowden said: “With echoes of Curtis Sittenfeld and Taylor Jenkins Reid, and with a protagonist even more magnetic and complex than Mad Men’s Betty Draper, Teddy is the smart, compulsive, darkly glamorous blockbuster of a novel I’ve been waiting for. Teddy is a woman in over her head—will she make it out alive?” 

Dunlay added: “I’ve spent so much time with Teddy that she feels like a friend. I’m especially grateful to Katie Greenstreet who understood Teddy from the beginning.”