Fu's début ignites Wildfire and Little, Brown US

Wildfire has pre-empted a "soaring", multigenerational début from Melissa Fu, examining Chinese history and the American immigrant experience, to publish in January 2022.

Publisher Kate Stephenson, along with editor Helen O’Hare in her first acquisition for Little, Brown in the US, struck the "major" deal for world rights all languages to Peach Blossom Spring with Clare Alexander at Aitken Alexander.

Billed as a novel "about war, migration, family and the search for a place to call home", it begins in 1938 when a young widow, Meilin, and her four-year-old son, Renshu, flee their burning city and start an epic journey across China, looking always to the inspiring stories of their most precious possession: a beautifully illustrated scroll. Surviving the Sino-Japanese and Chinese Civil wars, they spend a decade in Taiwan, before Renshu emigrates to America, where he’ll start his own family.

The publishers called it "an extraordinary debut which spans three generations of love, loss, and determination", adding: "Melissa Fu’s wonderful characters come to vivid life on the page and lodge themselves, irrevocably, in your heart. Her exploration of resilience and hope in the face of the chaotic 20th century illuminates both the past and the present as only the best historical fiction can."

Fu grew up in Northern New Mexico and now lives in the UK, finishing her novel in 2018/19 as the David T K Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She said: "I'm so thrilled! It has been an absolute joy to write this story and I'm looking forward to working with Kate and Helen to bring Peach Blossom Spring to publication."

Alexander said: "I always look for energy and passion when placing a debut novelist with a publisher and feel we have found just that with Kate and Helen. I have also admired Wildfire’s publication of two other terrific debuts, Fleishman is in Trouble and Blood Orange, so I am especially pleased to have my first deal with them."

Peach Blossom Spring will be published in January 2022.