Picador picks up new novel from Ridgway

Picador has picked up the first novel in eight years from award-winning Irish author Keith Ridgway.

Philip Gwyn Jones, in his first signing as Picador's new publisher, acquired UK, Irish & Commonwealth rights for A Shock from Laurence Laluyaux at RCW. North American rights have gone to Ridgway's long-time US publisher Barbara Epler at New Directions. Both will publish A Shock in the summer of 2021.

The book, Ridgway's seventh, is billed as “unsparing and slippery, but thrilling and memorable".

Picador said: “It features interlocking stories through which a clutch of more or less loosely connected characters appear, disappear and reappear. They are all of them on the fringes of London life, often clinging on — to sanity or solvency or a story — by their fingertips. Ridgway writes about people whose understanding of their own situation is only ever partial and fuzzy, who are consumed by emotions and anxieties and narratives, or the lack thereof, that they cannot master.”

Ridgway won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2001 and the Prix Femina Étranger in the same year. His most recent book, Hawthorn & Child (Granta), was released in 2012.