HarperFiction snaps up 'fierce' Freitas novel in six-figure pre-empt

HarperCollins’ Martha Ashby has snapped up a novel about “women’s bodily autonomy, motherhood and societal expectations” from American author and Publishers Weekly reviewer Donna Freitas in a six-figure pre-empt.

Martha Ashby, editorial director at HarperFiction, acquired The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano by Freitas in a six-figure pre-empt. The deal, for UK and Commonwealth excluding Canada, was negotiated by Leigh Butler at Penguin Random House US.  Pamela Dorman, v.p. and publisher of Pamela Dorman Books, pre-empted world rights overnight from Miriam Altshuler at DeFiore and Company.

HarperFiction will publish The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano in hardback in spring 2021.

The book “is a fierce, brilliantly-written, and timely novel about women’s bodily autonomy, motherhood and societal expectations, told with an intricate story structure reminiscent of Life After Life or The Sevens Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle”.

The publisher said the novel sees a woman splinter into different versions of herself: “Rose Napolitano is fighting with her husband, Luke: she promised she’d take pre-natal vitamins, but didn’t. He promised before they got married that he’d never want children, but now he’s changed his mind. Rose never wanted to have a child, and she’s known this since she was a teenager,” the synopsis reads. “The fight ends, and with it their marriage. But then, Rose has the fight with Luke about the vitamins again. This time the fight goes slightly differently, and so does Rose’s future – because it’s a different version of Rose who has this fight, this time. Soon there are many versions of Rose, all of them living out the consequences of this one fight with Luke, into a single story that spans over 25 years. As Rose splinters and then splinters again, can she ever find her way back to the person she thought she was or who she’d become?”

Freitas has written both fiction and non-fiction and has been mostly published in the US. She has been published in the UK through HarperCollins 360 (which focuses on distribution) but this will be her first book with HarperCollins UK. It is believed to be her first UK book deal. She lectures at universities across the US on her work about college students, most recently at Colby, Pepperdine, Harvard, and Yale. Over the years, she has written for national newspapers and magazines including Publishers Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post.

She said: “I am so thrilled to know that my novel and Rose, in her many variations, are in the hands of Martha Ashby and everyone at HarperCollins. Martha and her colleagues immediately understood Rose and all her lives, and my explorations of what it means to be a woman today - whether that woman is a mother, a non-mother, in all the possible forms we might choose to become or not to become these possible versions of ourselves. I hope all kinds of women will find themselves spoken through Rose's Nine Lives, and I am honoured to be publishing this novel with such a distinguished group of people.”

Ashby added: “I’m over the moon to have acquired Donna’s brilliant book for HarperFiction. The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano is the story I didn’t know I needed – a timely clarion call for women’s voices and the importance of a woman’s right to choose, told in one of the most engaging voices I’ve read in a long time. Added to that an intricate story structure, handled with utmost confidence, this book will have readers everywhere discussing Rose’s splintered life. I can’t wait to publish Nine Lives in the UK and I’m hugely excited to work with such a wonderful author.”