Granta signs second 'exhilarating' novel from Desmond Elliott winner Blakemore

Granta Books has signed a second "electric" novel from A K Blakemore, whose debut The Manningtree Witches won the Desmond Elliott Prize 2021 and is a Waterstones Book of the Month for November.

The publisher acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Zoe Ross at United Agents, for publication in spring 2024.

Set in 18th-Century France, The Bottomless Man tells the real life story of a peasant, Tarare, who develops an enormous appetite that can never be satisfied. The synopsis explains: "Through Tarare’s strange and discomforting life, from impoverished village boy to freakish spectacle in revolutionary Paris, from fighting in the French Revolutionary wars to monstrous medical curiosity, A K Blakemore’s exhilarating and disquieting new novel beautifully evokes the social upheaval and dissonance of the era: a world of desire, appetite and poverty; hope, chaos and survival."

Publishing director Bella Lacey said: "Thrilling, poetic and laced with wit, A K Blakemore’s electric new novel re-creates the sensual and chaotic world of revolutionary France, an unruly period of history which speaks perhaps unexpectedly to the upheavals and inequalities of 21st-Century Europe. And Tarare, by turns appealing and monstrous, is the perfect character through which to explore the period’s obsessions, pleasures and political tensions. A K Blakemore is an extraordinary talent, likened by many reviewers of The Manningtree Witches to Hilary Mantel, yet with a lyricism and perspicacity uniquely her own. I’m delighted to be publishing The Bottomless Man at Granta and to introduce her to even more readers."

Blakemore commented: "I am so thrilled to be working with Bella Lacey and Granta Books to bring to life the strange story of Tarare, a perplexing character who has lived in my mind for many years now. I hope that I do full justice to the complexity and beauty of his world, and that The Bottomless Man's eventual readers find him as dear (and disgusting) as I do."