Spring Hotlists: rom-coms and Russia head the top trends

Books on the Second World War, Russia and spycraft, rom-coms and a marked uptick in titles on the British Asian experience are some of the hot trends in The Bookseller's Spring Rights Focus Agents' Hotlists. 

The Rights Focus and its companion supplement, Springboard, were launched this week ahead of a number of digital fairs and virtual festivals run by literary agencies, trade organisations and publishers' rights teams over the next month after the London Book Fair and Bologna Children's Book Fair moved their dates to June and early July respectively. Agents and publishers hope their own bespoke virtual “Faux-lognas” and “e-LBFs” will concentrate acquisitive editors' minds during the crucial spring rights selling season. This is the first time The Bookseller has run a rights special and the Agents’ Hotlists outside a major fair. The full list can be found here.  

A typical Agents' Hotlist will always have a fair few Second World War tomes, but the focus this time seems less on expansive histories but more family memoir and tales of individual feats of bravery across non-fiction and fiction—less Antony Beevor and Max Edwards and more East West Street and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. For example, the story from journalist and Tory peer Daniel Finkelstein (pictured left) of his family's suffering during the war, Love and Murder, is with Toby Mundy at ACM; Aitken Alexander's Clare Alexander is repping Judith Mackrell's Going with the Boys, the story of women frontline war correspondents; while Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown has John Carr's Escape from the Ghetto, the story of a boy escaping the Lodz ghetto by killing a Nazi guard and going on the run across Europe. A poacher turned gamekeeper example is the agent Andrew Lownie pictured below, who has written Traitor King, about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's flirtation—or more than flirtation—with the Nazis (repped by Bill Hamilton at A M Heath).  

The Vladimir Putin regime in all its expansionist, human rights-abusing glory is the source of a number of books, two of which focus on the nearly-assassinated, now-imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny: Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet and Dr Ben Noble's Navalny (Euan Thorneycroft, Aitken Alexander) and FT Moscow correspondent Max Seddon's We are the Power (Matthew Marland, RCW).

Russia's real world recent spy shenanigans have undoubtedly put a spring back in the step (or poison back in the umbrella tip, if you will) of the spy fiction genre, although Mick Herron's success might have something to do with this, too. Outings this Hotlist include Katja Ivar's The Amerikanka (Marilia Savvides, 42 MP), Charlotte Philby's The Second Woman (Julia Silk, Charlie Campbell Literary Agents) and the relaunch of spy fiction legend Len Deighton's The Ipcress File (Tim Bates, PFD).    

As almost a counterpoint to the dificult themes of the Second World War and espionage, the Hotlist is also scattered with a raft of rom-coms, continuing a buoyant trend of the past couple of years. There's Holly Williams' What is Love? (which is not only romantic, but "fiercely romantic") repped by Tristan Kendrick at RCW, Justin Myers' The Fake Up (Becky Thomas, Johnson & Alcock) and Lindsay Kelk's On a Night Like This (Rowan Lawton, The Soho Agency).

It may be reductive to talk about an upswell of authors from previously underrepresented communities as a "trend". But it is an issue the industry has been grappling with for several years and we should not be shy about pointing out some positive steps. And there are by far more authors from a British Asian background in this Hotlist than in the 12 years that I have been compiling these lists. This may be a coincidence, and I should point out that since we limit each company to five entries this is a small portion of titles agencies are shopping at the moment. But the interesting thing is that the authors are represented across genres from the aforemetioned rom-coms (Tasmeem Abdur-Rashid's Finding Mr Not So Bad, Abi Fellows, The Good Literary Agency), commercial women's fiction (Salma El-Wadarny's The Way We Were, Florence Rees, A M Heath), crime (barrister-turned-author Imran Mahmood's I Know What I Saw, Camilla Bolton, Darley Anderson), lifestyle ("Masterchef" 2017 winner Saliha Mahmood Ahmed's Foodology, Heather Holden-Brown, hhb) and children's (Sarena Patel's latest Anisha Accidental Detective middle-grade novel, Granny Trouble, Kate Shaw).  

Finally, there are few pandemic titles apart from the "inside story" that is Race for the Vaccine from FT journalist Joe Miller and Ugur Sahin and Özlem Tureci, the husband-and-wife biotech entrepreneurs and scientists who teamed with the Big Pharma giant Pfizer to create its vaccine in under a year; and The Prince Rupert Hotel, by Sunday Times journalist Christina Lamb, about a Shrewsbury inn which gave the homeless free accommodation during the early stages of the pandemic. Jonny Geller and Curtis Brown's rights team have sold Race for the Vaccine into nine territories but not, at this writing, in the UK; while David Godwin has sold Lamb's book to HarperCollins.