Jonathan Cape bags Lacroix’s ‘deliriously funny’ debut in six-way auction

How it Works Out, the “whipsmart, fantastical and deliriously funny” debut novel by Myriam Lacroix, has gone to Jonathan Cape following a six-way auction.

Željka Marošević, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from John Ash as his first deal at CAA on behalf of Dan Kirschen. Kiara Kent at Doubleday pre-empted the novel in Canada and Zachary Knoll pre-empted the book for Overlook in the US. It will be published in 2024.

The novel blends autofiction and genre to follow the arc of a queer relationship by running it through a sequence of "hilarious, disturbing and startlingly original hypotheticals", said Jonathan Cape. How it Works Out asks how things might have played out between one couple in myriad universes.

Those hypotheticals include main characters Myriam and Allison becoming mothers by finding a baby in an alley. Another storyline is about the only cure for Myriam’s depression being Allison’s flesh. "How much darker—or sexier—would their dynamic be if one were a c.e.o. and the other a lowly employee and their relationship were unfolding against the backdrop of reckless capitalist profiteering in a burning world? In its thrilling combination of bold imagination and emotional depth, in its collapsing of the distance between the real and surreal, How it Works Out is a new kind of romance about love’s capacity to change and surprise us all," the synopsis continued.

Montreal-born translator and writer Lacroix was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LBGTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing. She said: “In her initial reaction to my book, Željka asked of a chapter that centres around a bad salad, ‘What, after all, is more queer than tummy issues?’ I knew right away that How it Works Out had found a great home, and an ideal editor, at Jonathan Cape.”

Marošević said: “I read How it Works Out on Valentine’s Day, the perfect day for this wildly original relationship story. Collapsing the boundaries of realism and genre, Myriam finds a thrilling new form for the queer love story.”