Sceptre snares Lloyd’s Jewish folklore and horror-inspired debut

Sceptre has acquired Toby Lloyd’s Fervour, a debut novel inspired by Jewish folklore and horror films, described by the publisher as “a darkly comic and compellingly original meditation on family, faith and generational trauma".

Executive publisher Federico Andornino acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Becky Thomas at the Lewinsohn Literary Agency. Sceptre will publish Fervour in hardback, export trade paperback, e-book and audio digital download on 22nd February 2024.

Rights have been sold to Avid Reader Press in the US, at auction, and to Gallimard in France, at auction, Neri Pozza in Italy and Kosmos in Finland. Sceptre will publish on 22nd February 2024 as one of its lead debut titles of the year.

Fervour tells the story of a close-knit Jewish family in London pushed to the brink when they suspect their daughter is a witch. Hannah and Eric are devout Jews living in north London with their three children and Eric’s father Yosef, a Holocaust survivor. Both intellectually gifted and deeply unconventional, the Rosenthals believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament and in the presence of God (and evil) in daily life.

As Hannah prepares to publish a sensationalist account of Yosef’s years in war-torn Europe — unearthing a terrible secret from his time in the camps – Elsie, her perfect daughter, starts to come undone. And then, in the wake of Yosef’s death, she disappears. When she returns, just as mysteriously as she left, she is altered in disturbing ways.

Witnessing the complete transformation of her daughter, Hannah begins to suspect that Elsie has delved too deep into the labyrinths of Jewish mysticism and gotten lost among shadows. But for Elsie’s brother Tovyah, a brilliant but reclusive student at Oxford, the truth is much simpler: his sister is the product of a dysfunctional family, obsessed with empty rituals and unbridled ambition. But who is right? And how can they stop the darkness from engulfing Elsie forever?

Lloyd has published short stories and essays in Carve Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Prospect. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and was longlisted for the 2021 V S Pritchett Short Story Prize.

Andornino said: “Fervour was one of the first books to land in my inbox after I joined Sceptre and it was one of the easiest acquisition decisions I have ever had to make. Who wouldn’t want to read an exploration of generational trauma partly inspired by Jewish folklore and with an atmosphere that is 50% The Secret History and 50% ’The Royal Tenenbaums’? It’s dark, surprising, twisted, genuinely scary at times but never anything but believable. Astonishingly, given the utter genius of his prose, this is Toby’s debut novel and I feel really lucky that I get to play a part in introducing him and his work to readers everywhere.”

Lloyd said: “Fervour grew out of an intense period of reading the Old Testament every night before I slept. As a deeply sceptical child, I resisted these ancient tales growing up, but returning to them as an adult – without my mother or my RE teacher breathing down my neck – was a revelation; I found in Genesis and the Books of Samuel all the pleasures of great narrative fiction.

“It dawned on me that I might use an obscure Bible story, one that is absurdly cruel and with no obvious morals, as the backbone of a contemporary novel about the paradoxes of life as a modern Jew. Almost six years later, I’m delighted to see the book published by Sceptre, alongside a wonderful list of fiction writers.

"Fervour pulls together a great many of my preoccupations of recent years — 20th-century history,  Jewish mysticism, the nature of belief — but at its heart is simply a family struggling to balance the demands of faith with life’s hard realities.”