Salt lands Petit's 'haunting and topical' novel My Hummingbird Father

Salt has landed My Hummingbird Father, Pascale Petit’s novel "packed with imagery and incidents connecting damaged lives to a damaged world".

Director Chris Hamilton-Emery acquired world rights, including translations, from Jon Curzon at Artellus for Petit’s debut novel and the book will be published in paperback on 15th September 2024.

My Hummingbird Father is described as "a beautifully lyrical debut novel in dialogue with her Ondaatje and Laurel Prize-winning poetry collection Mama Amazonica". The synopsis reads: "When artist Dominique receives a letter from her dying father, a reckoning with repressed memories and a pull for romantic and familial love sends shockwaves through her life, as she journeys to Paris to face the places and events of her early years.

"Balanced with visits to the Venezuelan Amazon, where Dominique explores a spiritual and loving longing (meeting a young guide, Juan), a raw and tender unfolding of this love story is a parallel to the uncovering of the shocking truth of Dominique’s birth, and her parents’ relationship."

Petit’s eighth collection, Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe Books), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection as well as for Wales Book of the Year, and a poem from the book won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her seventh poetry collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books), won the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020 as well as the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2018, as well as being shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize and picked as a Poetry Book Society Choice.

She was appointed as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. She was also the chair of the judges for the 2015 T S Eliot Prize and has been a judge for the Forward Prizes and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Petit said: "I wrote my novel after time spent with my estranged father in Paris, and in the otherworldly landscape of the Venezuelan Amazon. The city merged in my mind with the remote Amazonian plateau, Devil’s Mountain.

"This fictionalised story seeks redemption for a father but also juxtaposes an unspoilt landscape onto Paris, and vice versa, twinning abuse of women and children with abuse of the earth. I am grateful to my agent Jon for his unwavering belief, and to the intrepid Salt, thrilling pioneers of publishing, for bringing my book to readers."

Hamilton-Emery added: "Urgent, haunting and topical – Pascale’s novel is packed with imagery and incidents connecting damaged lives to a damaged world. It is an intimate tale of suffering and reconciliation that will delight her wide existing audience as well as find her new readers for this deeply relatable and unforgettable novel."