Granta acquires a new book by the author of Convenience Store Woman

Granta has snapped up Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

Associate publishing director Jason Arthur bought UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Nicole Aragi at Aragi Inc. Peter Blackstock at Grove Atlantic acquired North American rights. Granta will publish Vanishing World in hardback and e-book on 24th April 2025, alongside the US.

Murata is also the author of Convenience Store Woman (Granta Books). The synopsis of the new book reads: "Amane is 10 years old when she discovers she’s not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in ‘clean’, sexless marriages. But Amane’s parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society [...] But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there."

Arthur said: "There is no writer quite like Sayaka Murata, so it’s more than exciting to have a new novel from her, again translated by the exceptional Ginny Tapley Takemori. Vanishing World is every bit as joyfully weird, provocative, even transgressive, as Sayaka’s previous work, but also as thought-provoking and full of bizarre charm."

Murata added: "When I was writing Vanishing World, that was the world I inhabited then, with different values and shared ideas from the world I live in now. But for me, it was a world of truths that existed alongside what we call reality. Now the novel has been translated and it’s exciting to think that new readers will meet the people who live in that world. For me, it is nothing short of a very precious but strange miracle."