Picador bags Lunabba's 'truly mesmerising' memoir

Picador has bagged a "piercing" memoir, Will You Care If I Die?, from youth worker and social commentator Nicolas Lunabba. 

Andrea Henry, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Christine Edhäll at the Ahlander Agency. The memoir will be published in January 2024. 

The publisher wrote: "Following a childhood saturated in violence, Nicolas Lunabba has devoted his adult life to working with vulnerable young people in Malmö [Sweden]. An award-winning social worker and social commentator, he makes a difference in the lives of Malmö’s marginalised underclass, the people who live on the fringes of every society. The young boys in Nicolas’ charge trust him because, like them, he used to be an outsider too."

"In a world where children murder children it’s a job requiring firm boundaries, which are in place until Nicolas meets Elijah, an unruly teenager whose path through life looks uncertain. In allowing Elijah first into his home and then into his heart, Nicolas crosses one of his own red lines. With the odds stacked against them, and completely unprepared for the journey he and Elijah now set off on together, can Nicolas keep Elijah out of harm’s way and help him to build a brighter future?" 

Will You Care If I Die? is written as a letter to Elijah. It is a "disarmingly direct memoir" and a "blazingly topical universal story" about social class, race, friendship and unexpected love. 

Henry commented: "This is a truly mesmerising memoir – set in a Swedish city, but universal in its themes.  For readers of Tara Westover and Ta-Nehisi Coates, it delivers a powerful and current message from the margins of society. I found it beautiful, challenging, pertinent, and it left me an emotional wreck. I couldn’t be happier to be publishing Nicolas’s extraordinary book at Picador." 

Lunabba added: "Looking back on the process of writing this book, living in a two-room apartment with Elijah and worrying about if he would survive his childhood, I can’t imagine anything more foreign than seeing my notes being translated into English and published in the UK. It’s an insane idea! A dream too crazy to even imagine. And I couldn’t be more frightened, excited and happy, than I am right now. Looking forward to 2024!"