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Michelle Kane at Fourth Estate has won a seven-way auction for Rebecca Coxon’s “deeply honest and raw” memoir, Inconceivable.
PR and publishing director Kane acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Matilda Forbes Watson at WME. Sarah Stein has since bought North American rights for Harper US via Erin Malone at WME. Publication is scheduled for 2026.
The title recounts how when Coxon uploaded her genetic data to an ancestry website in 2016, it sparked a chain reaction of unravelling secrets that would "come to redefine everything she thought she knew about identity and the meaning of family”.
The "deeply honest and raw" book charts Coxon’s story as both a product and patient of IVF, donor-conceived and a donor herself, "and provides an intimate lens into the consequences of our choices about how we create new life. It is a moving portrait of how secrets can break and remake us, and how love can transcend decades of stigma and shame".
Coxon is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who was shortlisted for the British Journalism Awards for the programme on Britain’s rape crises that she wrote and directed for BBC’s "Panorama". Her print journalism includes pieces for Grazia and Broadcast, while she has also been a ghostwriter for over a decade.
Inconceivable will also weave Coxon’s own experience with famous figures whose lives and work were shaped in some way by infertility—Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, Hilary Mantel and Lena Dunham, and even Coxon’s own biblical namesake Rebecca, who bore twins Jacob and Esau after 20 years of attempting to conceive with her husband, Isaac.
Coxon said: “This book is a love letter to my family and all families created in non-traditional ways. After unwittingly finding myself in a whirlwind of ethical dilemmas a few years ago, I hope that my story will help break down the stigma of infertility and open up important and much-needed conversations about how we create families today.”
Kane added: “Rebecca’s book moved me as a daughter, woman, mother and reader in such a singular way. I was gripped by the tautness of her storytelling while moved to tears by the empathy she shows throughout.”