Souvenir Press picks up 'new framework for family life' from Oster

Souvenir Press will publish The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years by Emily Oster.

Souvenir Press publisher Rebecca Gray acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Matilda Forbes Watson at WME. Publication is scheduled for August 2021.

Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and a mother of two. She is the author of Cribsheet (Penguin Press, 2019) and Expecting Better (Penguin Press, 2013), which aimed to show readers that much of the conventional wisdom around pregnancy and the early years of parenting was wrong. 

In The Family Firm, she will offer a "data-driven framework for making choices and managing life with children aged five to 12". The synopsis reads: "Unlike the hourly challenges of infant parenting, the big questions in this age come up less frequently – but they are almost always more complicated. What’s the right kind of school?  How do you encourage a healthy diet? Should children play a sport and how seriously? How do you think smartly about encouraging their independence? Along with these bigger questions Oster outlines a way to run your family a bit more like a firm, beginning with the 'Big Picture' and going on to explain ways to structure your day as well as how to approach big decisions."

Gray said: "What Emily delivers is nothing short of revolutionary – The Family Firm continues her work of empowering us with ‘data plus preferences’ but now she moves things on and offers us a new framework for family life. There’s a generation of families who are ready to think about how they organise themselves so that life becomes less exhausting and communication is smoothed out. Emily has changed my life twice and I am ready for her third intervention. I know her legions of fans will feel the same.'

Oster commented: "I am so thrilled to be publishing The Family Firm with Rebecca and the Souvenir Press team. It’s been a privilege to be with my readers through pregnancy and early parenting, and I’m so excited for us all to take this next step together."