Text sells ‘The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted’ into North America

Text Publishing has sold North American rights to Robert Hillman’s forthcoming novel The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted to Putnam and Penguin Canada ‘for a significant sum’.

Hillman’s book, which follows the lives of a sheep farmer and a Hungarian Holocaust survivor in a small Victorian town in the 1960s, has also sold to A W Bruna in the Netherlands, Suma Internacional in Spain and Tchelet in Israel.

Text rights coordinator Khadija Caffoor said the book was one of the publisher’s lead titles at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, where it generated ‘a lot of interest’. ‘As soon as we sent it out internationally, we began receiving messages from people who said they were “falling in love” with these characters,’ said Caffoor.

‘It sits in that sweet spot where literary and mainstream readers find common ground,’ said Caffoor. ‘It has struck a chord with international readers because it speaks to universal themes of grief, longing and memory. It also has a unique and endearing cast of characters, and the threads of big moments in world history are woven so beautifully into their stories.’

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted will be released in Australian and New Zealand in April, and in North America in the American Spring 2019.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions