Tramp Press snaps up 'beautiful and profound' novel by Baume

Tramp Press has snapped up a "beautiful and profound" novel from Sara Baume. 

Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen, publishers, jointly acquired Ireland and UK rights for Seven Steeples from Lucy Luck at C&W, to publish on 7th April 2022. The book tells the story of a couple who push against traditional expectations, moving with their dogs to the Irish countryside, where they embed themselves in nature and make attempts to disappear from society.

Its synopsis explains: "It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another: one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they have drifted. They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up ‘to appraise the view’. A mountain ‘gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic’. They make a promise to climb the mountain, but—over the course of the next seven years—it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes."

Baume said: "It is again a joy to publish with Tramp Press, especially as this novella is a kind of companion piece to my last book, handiwork."

Sarah Davis-Goff, c.e.o. and publisher, said: "Sara Baume is simply one of the finest writers working anywhere today, and publishing this insightful, timely and oddly romantic work is a dream. We can’t wait for readers to meet it."

Baume's debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (Tramp Press/William Heinemann) was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Desmond Elliott Prize. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. A Line Made by Walking, her second novel, is published by Tramp Press in Ireland and William Heinemann in the UK; it was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2017. Her first piece of non-fiction, handiwork, was published by Tramp Press in 2020 and shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize.