Keyes to publish My Favourite Mistake with PMJ

Penguin Michael Joseph will publish Marian Keyes’ 16th novel, My Favourite Mistake, on 11th April 2024.

My Favourite Mistake is the second novel in a two-book deal secured by Louise Moore, managing director at Penguin Michael Joseph, who acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown.

“In My Favourite Mistake, we meet Anna – a life to envy, an apartment in New York, a well-meaning (too well-meaning?) partner and a high-flying job in beauty PR – but Anna has lost her taste for the Big Apple,” the publisher teased. “Turning a minor mid-life crisis into a major life event she bins the lot, heads back to Ireland, and gets a PR job for a super-high-end coastal retreat. The locals hate it, there have been threats – and violence, but Anna has worked in the beauty industry and there’s no wrinkle she can’t smooth over. Until she discovers that leaving New York doesn’t mean escaping her mistakes and Anna is forced to face them.”

Keyes said: “For my new book, I had great plans to write an opus, featuring seven ‘friends’, spanning 40 years. But as it included one or two terrible people, who made money from the misery of others, I just couldn’t do it. The world felt too sharp and pointy and what I wanted was to escape into something lovely.

"So! My Favourite Mistake is set in a (fictional) town in the wild beauty of Connemara. My main character Anna, once an upstanding, well-paid, Big Apple-dwelling citizen has, through a series of well-intentioned steps, accidentally burnt her bridges – a postpandemic life reappraisal that she got oh-so wrong. Suddenly without an income, she takes a job nobody would want, doing PR for a deliciously high-end retreat facing local opposition. That’s bad enough, but her reduced circumstances have dragged her back to a messy part of her past. And yes – so shoot me – My Favourite Mistake is, among other things, a love story. In fact it’s several love stories. Set in a beautiful place. About flawed people trying their best. It’s funny and hopeful, comforting and fun. I loved writing it and I’m bereft that I no longer get to spend my time there every day.”

Moore added: “In My Favourite Mistake, Marian has delivered a novel of utter comfort and joy. With her innate instinct for what readers crave, she has delivered a novel of pure escapism with a wonderful cast of new characters to fall in love with, a little bit of local espionage and a lot of laughs along the way. Classic Marian.”

Keyes has sold 7.8 million books for £49.2m via Nielsen BookScan TCM.