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HQ has pre-empted an “astute and powerful” début novel from producer and campaigner Ellie Keel in a two-book deal.
Cicely Aspinall, senior commissioning editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to The Four and one other novel from Cathryn Summerhayes at Curtis Brown. Spanish rights have also been pre-empted by Urano. It will publish in spring 2024.
The Four follows a group of scholarship students as they embark on their first year at elite boarding school High Realms. Rose, Marta, Lloyd and Sami are the Millennium Scholars: plucked from a thousand hopeful state-school applicants. They arrive dreaming of an education the world envies. What they find is a complex system of loyalty, honour and revenge, where in trying to save a vulnerable friend they are forced to do unforgivable things, damaging themselves and the values they hold sacred.
Keel said: “I’m so excited that my first novel will be published by such a dynamic imprint of a renowned publishing house and am hugely looking forward to collaborating with Cicely and the team on The Four and my next book in due course. To be working with my brilliant and passionate agent Cathryn Summerhayes and the fantastic HQ team truly is a début novelist’s dream come true.”
Aspinall added: “Ellie Keel has created a world of impossible privilege and allure and a cast of characters that readers will never forget. I was hooked from the very first sentence and powerless to stop, ensnared by this dark tale of friendship, loyalty and morality. This is the kind of astute and powerful novel that comes around so rarely and we are thrilled to be Ellie’s publisher.”
Summerhayes also commented: “I was one of many agents who read Ellie’s exceptional début and I knew I had to represent her. She writes like a dream and The Four is the start of an amazing second career for her as an author. I’m thrilled to be joining Ellie on her journey and equally thrilled that Cicely and the team at HQ share my excitement and vision.”
Keel is the founder director of the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, a literary prize and campaign for gender equality among writers for the stage in the UK and Ireland. In 2022 she was the youngest producer ever to be shortlisted for Producer of the Year in The Stage Awards.