Head of Zeus snaps up Rupert Thomson's 'haunting and disturbing' new book

Head of Zeus has snapped up How to Make a Bomb, a new novel by Rupert Thomson.

Neil Belton, editor-in-chief of the publisher’s Apollo imprint, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Peter Straus at the RCW Literary Agency, as part of a two-book deal. The book will be published in hardback and e-book on 11th April 2024.

"Philip Notman, an acclaimed historian, attends a conference in Bergen, Norway," the synopsis says. "On his return to London, and to his wife and son, something unexpected and inexplicable happens to him, and he is unable to settle back into his normal life."

It goes on to add: "Seeking answers, he flies to Cadiz to see Inés, a Spanish academic with whom he shared a connection at the conference, but his journey doesn’t end there. A chance encounter with a wealthy, elderly couple sends him to a house on the south coast of Crete. As he tries to make sense of both his personal circumstances and the world surrounding him, he finds himself embarking on a course of action that will push him to the very brink of disaster."

Thomson is the author of 13 novels, including The Insult (Bloomsbury), which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and Death of a Murderer (Bloomsbury), which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. His memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop (Granta Books), won the Writers’ Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2010, and he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He said: "Neil Belton is that rare thing, an editor reads my work as if from the inside and has an immediate and instinctive understanding of the spirit in which it was written. This is the beginning of something special."

Belton said: "Rupert Thomson is the most consistently creative, surprising and stimulating of living English novelists. I’ve admired his fiction ever since Dreams Of Leaving and The Five Gates of Hell, and it’s a privilege to be able to publish a new book by him, especially one so attuned to the disastrously fractious times we live in. How to Make a Bomb is a haunting and disturbing book."