Serpent’s Tail goes to War for Lish's 'exquisite' novel

Serpent’s Tail has pounced on The War for Gloria, the "exquisite" work of literary fiction by award-winning novelist and former US marine Atticus Lish. 

Luke Brown, commissioning editor, bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown and US agent Amanda Urban at ICM Partners. Serpent’s Tail will publish the novel in hardback, e-book and as an export trade paperback on 26th May 2022.

Lish has described the novel in the Paris Review as "autobiographical, although disguised". It follows Corey Goltz, a teenager growing up in the working-class outskirts of Boston and the only child of Gloria, whose ambitions were derailed early but who has always given her son everything she can. Corey, restless, dreams of leaving home for a great adventure.

"Instead, when he is 15, the world comes crashing down on him, when Gloria is diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and, too late, his estranged father, Leonard – a man of great charisma but dubious moral character – re-enters the picture," the synopsis explains. "Determined to be his mother’s hero at any cost, Corey begins shouldering responsibility for her expensive medical care, pushing himself to his physical and emotional limits as her disease cruelly progresses. And as Leonard’s influence over Corey grows, Corey must dismantle the myth of his father’s genius and confront the evil that lurks beneath it."

The publisher said: "Gritty, visceral, and profoundly stirring, The War for Gloria tells the story of a young man, straddling childhood and adulthood, whose yearning to protect his mother requires him to risk destroying his father. An indelible work from a strikingly original voice in American fiction."

Lish’s debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life (Oneworld), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the New York City Book Award and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. The War for Gloria, his second novel, is informed by the author’s own experience of caring for his mother when she was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive nervous system disease that causes loss of muscle control, when he was 15.

Brown said: "This is exquisite, propulsive, heartbreaking American literary fiction about a boy’s relationship with his dying mother and his embittered father. It is concerned with the pain of love and of the difficulty of finding a different shape for our life from the one we inherited from our parents. [This] novel confirms Atticus Lish as one of the greatest novelists in the English language."