Granta acquires de Freston's exploration of love, loss and creativity

Granta has snapped up Strange Bodies: An Artist’s Love Story by artist and writer Tom de Freston, husband of award-winning novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

Publishing director and m.d. Bella Lacey acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for the non-fiction title from Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates. It will publish in spring 2024.

Foregrounding the couple’s relationship, the book explores the dynamic between lovers and creative collaborators, drawing lines between romantic love, marriage, and the relationship between artist and canvas, viewer and painter. 

"Recounting the multiple pregnancies Kiran lost during lockdown, Tom re-evaluates his artistic practise by returning to the painters that made him one himself," the synopsis explains. "He wrestles with how, and if, he should make work in the face of recurrent losses – the babies they would never hold, the distance between his wife’s experience and Tom’s own – in a reflection on how painting and art can help us make sense of everyday cruelties, and how it can translate, inspire, and even influence the way we live our lives."

Lacey said: "Tom’s writing is irresistible: it’s fervent, distinctive and idiosyncratic; rich with layers of meaning, and an intensity of emotion. Reading the proposal for Strange Bodies, I was profoundly moved by Tom’s account of his and Kiran’s lost pregnancies – by his reflections from a father’s point of view – and left speechless by the way in which he melds memoir with writing on art to reach for such bold, universal ideas. I am delighted to be continuing our work with Tom at Granta."

De Freston added: " I was overwhelmed by the bookseller support and reader response to Wreck (Granta). Working with everyone at Granta has exponentially challenged and grown me as a writer, and there is nowhere I would rather be. Strange Bodies is an intensely personal and heartfelt work, I hope it will speak to the universal truths of love and loss."