Serpent's Tail signs Hogeland's 'utterly propulsive' debut

Serpent’s Tail has scooped The Long Answer, an "extraordinarily skillful" debut novel by American author Anna Hogeland. 

Publisher Hannah Westland acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Penguin Random House US. Foreign rights have sold to La Nave di Teseo (Italy), Ullstein Verlag (Germany), DeGeus (The Netherlands), Jota Nakladatelstvi (Czech), Gutkind (Denmark).

Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond, and complications with Anna’s own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the babies they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in. 

"The Long Answer is a novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared," the synopsis explains. "Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility."

Westland said: "When I began to read this book, the feeling that I needed to share it with others was overwhelming. This is a very special novel, both as an utterly propulsive human drama and as an extraordinarily skillful rendering of the intimate lives of women and their experiences of family dynamics, friendship, pregnancy, miscarriage and parenthood. It is so accomplished it is hard to believe it’s a debut, and there is no question Anna Hogeland has a major literary career ahead. We are absolutely thrilled to be publishing her."

Hogeland is a psychotherapist who lives in Vermont. She said: "I am so deeply honored and extremely excited to be published by Serpent’s Tail. I can’t imagine a better UK home for my novel, and I’m impatiently awaiting the summer when it will be in the world!"

The Long Answer will publish in July 2022. PRH US imprint Riverhead is publishing in June 2022 in North America.