Hamish Hamilton wins four-way auction for Schaffer-Goddard's defence of sensuous life

Hamish Hamilton has triumphed in a four-way auction for Make Me Feel Something, a "thought-provoking and richly pleasurable" non-fiction book by Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard on how to find meaning through our bodies. 

Senior commissioning editor Hermione Thompson acquired UK and Commonwealth rights with serial and audio rights from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander, on behalf of Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord Literistic. Make Me Feel Something will be published in hardback in the first half of 2024.

North American rights previously sold in a 10-way auction to Sarah Murphy at Ecco. German rights sold at auction to Hanser, Italian rights at auction to La Feltrinelli, Korean rights at auction to WoongJin ThinkBig, and Brazilian Portuguese rights went to Alta Books.

The book argues many of us suffer from an acute overload of stimuli in our virtual age, yet we engage with our actual physical senses less and less. This raises questions about the point of physical life and what our bodies are for. The narrative non-fiction work goes on to "make the case for embodied sensation as the core of a meaningful life".

Its synopsis states: "From Silicon Valley to the lavender fields of Provence, from the fabric markets of Hong Kong to the fjords of Norway, and from the metaverse to the Maldon Salt Factory, the book invites its reader on a journey in pursuit of loud, vibrant, immediate sensory encounters, and the knowledge that those encounters uniquely give us. Considering each sense in turn, Schaffer-Goddard launches an expansive investigation into what it takes to feel alive again, weaving cultural criticism with narrative reporting, examples from art and history, personal memoir and playfully practical experiments in ‘sensory training’."

Thompson commented: "Jennifer’s writing is simply brilliant – irreverent, entertaining, intellectually keen-eyed and omnivorous, deeply generous-spirited, and a total pleasure to spend time with. As she says herself, this is a book not just about how we live now but how we feel now, and how those two things are intertwined. It also reaches far beyond the now, toward timeless questions about what it means to be a body in the world, what it means to be human. Ultimately Make Me Feel Something offers a striking defence of mortality itself, in contrast to the weirdly deathless, infinite but insubstantial metaverse which big tech companies want us to believe is utopia. My head didn’t stop nodding until the last page." 

Schaffer-Goddard added: "Make Me Feel Something is the book I have been readying to write for a decade, as I’ve watched the greedy maw of the tech industry cannibalise and debase the richest and most irreplaceable parts of our embodied lives. I am honored that this work has found its place at Hamish Hamilton, home to so many authors whose work I not only admire but adore. The collective verve, audacity, and style of Hamish Hamilton’s authors astounds me, and I am a great admirer of the work Hermione has brought into being, from Sophie Mackintosh to Natasha Brown. From our first conversation, I have been alight with excitement about our editorial partnership." 

Paterson said: "It’s an honour to represent Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard in the UK on behalf of Jim Rutman; she is a writer of unquenchable curiosity, deep feeling and enormous style."