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Tinder Press has acquired a debut novel by Naomi Ishiguro, former bookseller and bibliotherapist at Mr B’s Emporium in Bath.
Common Ground is a "bittersweet" coming-of-age story about Stan and Charlie, two teenagers who inhabit very different worlds yet form a friendship over afternoons spent on the local common, which will come to shape and define each of their lives.
It will be released on 25th March 2021. Mary-Anne Harrington acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in Common Ground and an untitled second novel from Peter Straus at RCW, calling it "a wonderfully timely and openhearted novel about friendship that feels enchanting and provocative in equal measures".
Ishiguro is the author of the story collection Escape Routes, which published in February 2020 and was described by Neil Gaiman as a collection of stories "that start like delicate webs and finish like unbreakable steel traps". It is out in paperback on 21st January 2021. She is the daughter of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of 2017's Nobel Prize in Literature.
Of her forthcoming novel, Ishiguro said: "Common Ground is a novel about a friendship that crosses one of Britain’s most entrenched cultural divides. I wanted to explore what kind of stresses and strains ingrained prejudice, structural inequality and the hostile environment might place on that relationship. I wanted, too, to write a book that, without being unrealistic and sentimental, really celebrates the power friendship has to weather those challenges, and ultimately to make our world a kinder and a brighter place."