A&U acquires Knox’s “The Second Child”

Allen & Unwin (A&U) has acquired ANZ rights to Malcolm Knox’s The Second Child, in a deal brokered by Jane Novak of Jane Novak Literary Agency.

Following on from Knox’s novel The First Friend, which was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Award and longlisted for the Sir Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, The Second Child is “a satirical thriller about one young woman’s plot to outsmart the supreme dictators in a world on fire,” according to the publisher.

Set in 1945, between Hitler’s death and the destruction of Hiroshima, “the novel returns us to the world of Stalin’s court, 7 years on from The First Friend”. “While Stalin gaslights world leaders at peace conferences, Melor Murtov, having returned from exile, steps into the power plays of the Kremlin’s next generation to enact her own devious plans.”

Publisher Alex Craig said the novel “charts history but is also terrifyingly prescient in its depiction of a world being shaped by the fantasies and lies of tyrants and madmen”.

Knox said: “The First Friend took me down a rabbit hole that I can’t get out of. The Second Child is more of a girls’ own adventure, continuing the story into the next generation, and [it] asks new questions about how a young person can make her way in a dictatorship when any misstep could be her last.”

A Walkley Award–winning writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, Knox is the author of novels including Summerland, the Ned Kelly Award–winning A Private Man, and Jamaica, which won the Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted in the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

His nonfiction titles include Boom: The Underground History of Australia, From Gold Rush to GFC, which won the 2013 Ashurst Business Literature Prize; and Bradman’s War, which was shortlisted for that year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

A&U plans to publish The Second Child in September.

Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions