Jonathan Cape triumphs in seven-way auction for Benoît’s ‘groundbreaking guide to friendship’

Jonathan Cape has signed debut writer and academic Rachel Benoît’s "groundbreaking guide to friendship" after a seven-way auction.

Editorial director Željka Marošević acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for The Friendship Wheel from John Ash at PEW Literary, who turned down multiple attempted pre-empts. The book also saw a six-figure pre-empt by Hilary Redmon, vice-president and executive editor at Penguin Random House, plus pre-empts in Norway (Gyldendal), Italy (Longanesi) and the Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam), and by Penguin Random House Germany. 

According to the publisher, The Friendship Wheel combines an original and fascinating framework for understanding friendship with real-life stories of every kind of relationship, from new to old friends.  

Its synopsis reads: “Struck by the guilt and shame of a friendship ‘break-up’, Rachel Benoît set out to understand why it was so difficult to describe what had gone wrong. She realised we have multiple ways of analysing love but lack tools for exploring our friendships. So Rachel developed the Friendship Wheel, a colour-based taxonomy for friendship, for the first time giving us a shared language to describe the infinite variety of friendship experiences.

“Organising friendship types across a colour wheel, Rachel explains why friendships work, why they go wrong, develop and transition, and why our most devoted friendships can be the hardest relationships of all.”

Benoît, who works as a corporate ethnographer trying to understand the motivations behind human behaviour, said: “Our friendships are fundamental and complex—they reveal who we are and how we got there. The Friendship Wheel asks us to consider not only what we need from our friends (and why), but the role that we play in their lives.”

Marošević added: “Sometimes a book comes along that immediately transforms how you think about the world and The Friendship Wheel is one of those books. It’s pure genius.”