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W&N snaps up memoir and novel from ‘luminous’ Beecher
Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) has snapped up a memoir and an as-yet-untitled novel from Anna Beecher, the author of Here Comes the Miracle.
Publishing director Lettice Franklin acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to the two books from Jenny Hewson at Lutyens & Rubinstein. Memoir in essays We All Come Home Alive, described by Franklin as “full of heart, hope, moments of recognition and exquisite sentences that I want to learn to live by,” will be published in spring 2024.
In the memoir, Beecher tells the story of her life through the shocks she has experienced: “The shock of birth; of death. The shock of a body transformed: of finding oneself a teenage girl, a mother, a patient. The shock of disasters: of car crashes, crises and losses. The shock, despite all of these, of love and of joy; the shock of surviving each of these particular moments, and of what might bloom in their wake.”
Franklin said: “Anna Beecher is one of the most accomplished authors of her generation. Her writing has the luminous beauty, the warmth and the wisdom of Maggie O’Farrell and Ann Patchett. She was one of the first authors I brought to W&N and I am so thrilled to have acquired two new books from her. We All Come Home Alive will be cherished by readers of Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am (Tinder Press), Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days (Bloomsbury) or Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self (Hamish Hamilton).
Beecher, whose debut was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2021, said: “In the surreal early days of the pandemic, I found myself retracing previous times where my future had felt frightening and utterly unknown: the years surrounding my brother’s death and the smashed-glass minutes after a car crash, the autumn when I quietly lost my mind.
“Covid suddenly made it urgent to write about these moments, to work out how I had survived them. And in doing so I discovered each to be a shining hinge; life had so often become ‘impossible’ right before it opened. I realised that I was writing about the shocks of my life, the greatest of which has been joy. Joy has always stubbornly come back for me.”
