Icon acquires Meller's history of Jewish refugees in Shanghai

Icon has acquired The Box with the Sunflower Clasp, a story of family secrets and a young Jewish woman’s escape from 1930s Vienna to Shanghai by Rachel Meller.

Senior commissioning editor Clare Bullock bought UK and Commonwealth rights to the memoir from Tom Drake-Lee at D H H Literary Agency. Icon will publish in April 2023.

The story is based on the experiences of the author’s family, centring on her aunt Lisbeth. In an intricately carved box, Meller discovered photographs, letters and documents that uncovered a story she had never known, "that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was swept up by war and forced to flee to Shanghai". 

"The book will recount how, far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life—a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis," the synopsis continues. "It will describe 1930s Shanghai: a metropolis where the old rules do not apply; a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigrés; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman could find love."

Meller grew up near London, the middle daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees. After studying neurobiology at Sussex, and researching hormones and behaviour at Cambridge, she became a writer in a communication consultancy. The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is her first book.

Bullock said: "After the past few years, one might be forgiven for asking whether there are still new stories to be told about the Second World War, and the Holocaust. In reading The Box with the Sunflower Clasp, the answer is, undeniably, yes. Rachel Meller uses her own family history to tell the story of the Jews of Shanghai, refugees who fled Hitler’s tyranny in Europe and sought safety in a city on the other side of the world. 

"It’s a story I couldn’t believe I had never heard of and one that I am immensely proud to be publishing at Icon next spring. As Icon continues to grow, it seems particularly appropriate to commission this book; we are witnessing another brutal European war and this book reminds us of the human capacity to endure and survive, and of the duty we all have to support refugees, no matter where in the world they come from."