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Jonathan Cape pre-empts Brodie Crellin’s debut novel
Jonathan Cape has pre-empted Brodie Crellin’s debut novel, A Sense of Occasion.
Publishing director Hannah Westland acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Harriet Moore at Aitken Alexander. North American rights have been acquired by Alison Fairbrother at Riverhead Books.
The synopsis states: “A Sense of Occasion sees a fractured family – cousins Jude and Patch, and their uncle and father Robin – come together in a small English village for the funeral of their ex-partner, mother and aunt, Mary. Grief manifests itself in unpredictable ways, stripping away social conventions, and this is especially true for this family who, as they do their best to make appropriate preparations for the funeral, find themselves behaving with increasing abandon.
“Minutely attuned to the absurdities and complexities of family dynamics, and the ways grief and desire, love and resentment are entangled, this novel is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, and heralds the arrival of a major new talent in British fiction.”
Westland said: “Brodie Crellin has a brilliant ear for dialogue and an acute understanding of the complicated truths all relationships contain, perfectly capturing the potency, wretchedness and unexpected hilarity of family gatherings. Crellin is equally skilled at drawing out the tensions between village and urban life and the pressures of class and generational dynamics. Crellin feels like the very best of classic British social novelists, but with an entirely modern take on the world.”
Crellin added: “This book is about grief – its grammar, its accounting – and at the story’s centre is a family who are struggling to connect.”
A Sense of Occasion will publish in the UK in 2026.
