The Bodley Head wins 23-publisher auction for Dr Orna Guralnik’s Couples

The Bodley Head has won a 23-publisher auction for Couples: The Crisis of Intimacy and the Influence of Big History by clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr Orna Guralnik.

Will Hammond, deputy publishing director, acquired UK & Commonwealth rights from Rachel Clements at Abner Stein on behalf of Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company. Ginny Smith, v.p. and executive editor, acquired North American rights on behalf of Penguin Press from Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company. They will publish simultaneously in 2027.

Couples is described as "a groundbreaking and transformative guide to partner relationships and how to navigate the conflicts that arise in them". It will also present a far-reaching vision of why such conflicts are inevitable and what they can teach us about ourselves and the ways in which we are shaped by culture and history.

Dr Guralnik is widely known as the star of the fly-on-the-wall docuseries "Couples Therapy", which presents an authentic eye-witness view of her therapy sessions with couples in crisis. She is also an academic based at NYU Postdoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City, and is co-founder of the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Mount Sinai Medical School.

Hammond said: "Couples is going to be a defining book that unlocks relationships, but also unlocks a whole new way of being in the world. Fundamentally, it is about seeing things from another’s point of view – why we find that so hard, how to overcome that challenge, and the extraordinary transformation that occurs in our relationships when we do. It is unmistakeably a classic in the making and will change readers’ lives."