Hodder snaps up queer festive rom-com from Huxley-Jones

Hodder & Stoughton has acquired Make You Mine This Christmas, a queer festive rom-com by autistic editor and author Lizzie Huxley-Jones.

Assistant editor Bea Fitzgerald acquired world rights to the novel from Abi Fellows at The Good Literary Agency for an e-book publication in October 2022 and paperback in late 2023.

Make You Mine This Christmas is described by the publisher as "a brilliantly funny and utterly swoon-worthy rom-com loaded with fake dating hijinks and jaw-dropping drama".

When Haf is seen kissing Christopher under the mistletoe at a party, she agrees to pretend to be his girlfriend for the holidays – only for their plans to be complicated by the fact she’s falling for his sister.

Lizzie Huxley-Jones, who edited Stim (Unbound) and authored the children’s biography Sir David Attenborough: A Life Story (Scholastic), said: “As an author, my intention is to build joyful havens for queer and disabled people with characters who resonate with them. It was an absolute joy to write Make You Mine This Christmas, a rom-com which puts Christmas, queerness and disability at the centre, and which I hope readers will love as much as I do.

“It is very much a book of my heart – my love of rom-coms, being perennially online, and my constant unseasonal desire for Christmas food. I’m so honoured to work with the brilliant, insightful Bea Fitzgerald as my editor and be steered by my wonderful cheerleader agent, Abi Fellows – truly a dream team who made this book an absolute dream to write.”

Fitzgerald said: “This book is everything to me – funny, wholesome and full of so many festive shenanigans. I’ve loved every minute of working with Lizzie and Abi and of having a team behind the book who are so invested in seeing queer and disabled happiness and love on the page. I’m so excited for this book to go out into the world. To everyone who thought Aubrey Plaza should have got the girl in ’Happiest Season’, this one’s for you."

Fellows added: “A joyful queer Christmas rom-com has been so long overdue and Lizzie has absolutely risen to the task. This novel is laugh-out-loud funny, heart-warmingly romantic and deliciously sexy. I can’t wait for readers to delight in the wonderful bisexual chaos and joy within these pages. It has given me enormous pleasure to represent this and to find so perfect an editor for it in Bea.”