John Murray Press pre-empts Lucy Steeds' 'gorgeously immersive novel about art'

John Murray Press has pre-empted The Artist by Faber Academy and London Library Emerging Writers graduate Lucy Steeds.

Jocasta Hamilton, executive publisher at John Murray, pre-empted world rights from Eleanor Birne at PEW for a "strong six figures" in a two-book deal. The Artist will be published as a super-lead title for John Murray in early 2025.

"Inspired by a line in an art history book which claimed, ‘there are no female forgers’ Lucy Steeds created The Artist, a gorgeously immersive novel about art, love and freedom set in the aftermath of the First World War," the synopsis says. "While being a deeply satisfying mystery and love story, it also brilliantly challenges the way we view women and women’s art and questions how we value women’s labour," it adds. 

Steeds said: "I wanted to write a novel that gave space to a sneaky, sly woman, and paint her with compassion (I love spiky heroines with soft hearts), showing the subversive ways women carve out creative lives for themselves. The Artist is about so many things but ultimately, it is about two people grabbing the other by the hand and pulling each other into life."

Hamilton commented on the acquisition: "It’s a novel alive with sensory pleasure—taste the food, see the colour, sweat in the heat and experience the desire—which is also brilliant on what it means to be a creative person. Plotted with great confidence and grace, it is full of reveals and surprises, a novel of depth, anger, and ultimately a supremely satisfying sense of characters we come to love freeing themselves from expectations and the dark shadow of war."