Their purchases range from the big new ‘psychological thriller’ to advice from Murakami. Psychological thrillers have been the big stars.
At least that’s what Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial thinks, having acquired two of the most in demand titles for its imprints Plaza & Janés and Grijalbo. The Woman in the Windows (La mujer en la ventana), the first novel by the editor Dan Mallory, portrays a woman who has separated from her husband and daughter and spends all day drinking, chatting and staring out the window… until she witnesses an unusual act of violence that will end up involving her. Another tense book is The Chalk Man (El hombre de tiza) by C.J. Tudor, in which a 30 year old chalk drawing will come back to haunt its creator following a murder.
Roca Editorial has also acquired a brace of genre novels. Isola by Asa Avdic is set in 2037 in a totalitarian state where food and information are rationed. (…) In the legal thriller Anatomy of a scandal (Anatomía de un escándalo) by Sarah Vaughan, a woman finds her life turned upside down when her husband is accused of murder.
Seix Barral has acquired a début novel by the creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, Heather, the Totality.
Anagrama has bought the unpublished stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald for publication in 2017. With titles such as I’d die for you (Moriría por ti), they were rejected in the thirties for their dark and depressing subject matter. The publisher will also be bringing out the new book by Arundathy Roy, who took her time, almost 20 years, over a follow up to her début The God of Small Things. Now she is presenting The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (El ministerio de la felicidad), almost five hundred pages of striking stories and characters.
Alfaguara will be publishing the crime novel Recursos inhumanos (Cadres noirs) by Pierre Lemaitre and The Chemist (La farmacéutica), the first novel for adults by Stephanie Meyer. They’ve also bought Lazos (Ties), a novel by the writer husband of Anita Raja, allegedly Elena Ferrante, Domenico Startone, and winner of the Strega award.
Taurus has bought one of the books of the fair, El libro del silencio (The Book of Silence) by the Norwegian writer Erling Kagge, which requires just over a hundred pages to seek out and capture a little peace in an increasingly noisy world by following the teachings of Hygge, the Norwegian concept of happiness, which is in great demand at the fair.
Debate is exploring the refugee crisis with the non-fiction account Lágrimas de sal (Tears of Salt) by Pietro Bartolo, the testimony of a doctor from Lampedusa who treats hundreds of refugees who arrive at the Italian coast every day.
Planeta has bought El niño en la bodega (The Boy in the Cellar) by Katherine Marsh, who addresses the issue from a literary perspective, telling the story of a young American living in Brussels who hides a Syrian refugee in his house shortly before the terrible terrorist attacks on the Belgian capital in 2016.
Lumen have picked up Asimetría (Asymmetry) a début by Lisa Halliday, a former employee of the fearsome Wylie Agency, a love story that might well be inspired by her relationship with the eternal Nobel candidate Philip Roth, as well as the stories of Camilla Grudova (El alfabeto de la muñeca, The Doll’s Alphabet) and Marta Orriols (Anatomía de las distancias cortas, An Anatomy of Short Distances), the first Catalan author taken on by Silvia Querini in her long career.
Acantilado have snapped up Mao’s Great Famine (La gran hambruna de Mao, Samuel Johnson Prize) by Frank Dikötter, who continues to dissect the major dictatorships of the 20th century following forays into Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Galaxia Gutenberg has contracted The Fear and the Freedom (El miedo y la libertad) by the historian who wrote Continente salvaje (Savage Continent), Keith Lowe, and Age of Ange (La era de la cólera) by Pankaj Mishra (De las ruinas de los imperios), a book about the contemporary world.
For its non-fiction list, Tusquets has bought Free Speech (Discurso libre) by Timothy Garton Ash, a kind of guide to what you should and shouldn’t say on social networks.
And regarding the newest Nobel Laureate for Literature, in Spain Malpaso has beaten off other publishers for the rights to two works by Bob Dylan, which will come out before Christmas.
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