Headline Review acquires YA star Zoë Marriott's début novel for adults

Headline Review has acquired The Moonlit Maze, the début adult novel from award-winning YA author Zoë Marriott. 

Publisher Sherise Hobbs snapped up world rights from Kate Shaw at The Shaw Agency, with Goldmann victorious in the German auction. Headline will publish in hardback in June 2025. 

Marriott wrote her YA début The Swan Kingdom when she was 21, and has written eight more critically acclaimed, award-winning YA novels published in the UK by Walker Books and in the US by Candlewick. 

The Moonlit Maze is set in the windswept Yorkshire village of Winterthorne in 1924 when a young woman slips away from a glittering ball at Kearsley Castle and into the maze to meet someone. “By the morning, the grand house is in ashes, two bodies have been removed, and the events of that night swiftly covered up,” the publisher teased. “Decades later, a newcomer to the village discovers the ruins and realises that the past is destined to repeat itself until a dark secret is laid bare and a past wrong made right.” 

Hobbs said: “As soon as I started reading the manuscript, I was entranced. Zoë’s gripping, moving and beautifully written story of forbidden love, betrayal and atonement speaks of the power of secrets to hold you captive – and to set you free.” 

Marriott added: “The Moonlit Maze took 10 years to write, drawing on my experiences of grief and healing in order to tell a deeply personal story of the persistence of love. Sherise’s understanding and care for my characters is everything I dreamed of in an editor.”