Text sells US, UK rights to Collette debut; Hillman picked up by Faber

28 June 2018 Books+Publishing

Text Publishing has sold North American rights to Katherine Collette’s forthcoming debut The Helpline to Tara Parsons, editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster’s (S&S) Touchstone division in the US, in a deal negotiated by David Forrer at InkWell Management.

UK rights to the novel have also sold to S&S UK fiction publishing director Jo Dickinson.

Parsons told Publishers Weekly, ‘We are delighted to have prevailed at auction across all three territories’, noting that the project had come in separately to S&S’s Canadian and UK offices. ‘[It] is a dazzlingly funny, big-hearted novel in the vein of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and The Rosie Project,’ she said.

The book’s North American release is scheduled for the US summer of 2019. Text will publish the book in Australia and New Zealand in September 2018.

The Melbourne independent publisher has also sold UK and Commonwealth rights (ex ANZ and Canada) to Robert Hillman’s The Bookshop of the Broken-Hearted to Faber, reports Book Brunch.

Rights were sold to Faber editorial director Louisa Joyner and negotiated by Sarah Lutyens at Lutyens & Rubinstein.

Joyner said in a statement, ‘I search high and low for that rare blend: a novel made up of sentences that waste nothing in the telling, suffused with a generosity of spirit that breathes life into each and every character, so it was a happy day when Tom Hope and his world fell into my hands.’

Faber will publish The Bookshop of the Broken-Hearted as a special paperback original in June 2019, timed for Independent Bookshop Week in the UK. Text previously sold North American rights to Hillman’s novel to Putnam and Penguin Canada ‘for a significant sum’.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions