Shirley Collins



... and also I wanted to remind the world about the MOST exciting book to land on my desk in a while - it's one I am totally in love with.


The book is called: America Over the Water by Shirley Collins. Shirley is/was a very famous singer in Britain but her book is a heart-warming and beautiful memoir of a single year: 1959, when she travelled to America as a young girl from the English town of Hastings to join her lover in America - a man twenty years her senior.



The man was Alan Lomax the famous music historian (whose book The Land Where the Blues Began sold over 3 million copies world-wide). He was returning to America after a period in exile in Europe because of McCarthy and he asked the young Shirley to come and join him. The relationship was ultimately doomed - but for the course of that year she travelled the American Deep South recording the music of the poor black and white communities. She was a stranger travelling in the Southern States on the eve of the Civil Rights era... and the book is an extraordinary record of that time ... but most of all it is a powerfully understated book from a really remarkable woman. Shirley's writing is subtle, suggestive and very revealing. It is a book to be enjoyed by anyone who reads and thinks: it presupposes no knowledge of the music and it does not lecture - it enlightens.


You can see more about Shirley on her website
www.shirleycollins.co.uk and I have reading copies available of the paperback edition (out in the UK next month)and there is a vast amount of press/archive material available on Shirley.


I really am infatuated with this book - and think it should become a classic of women's memoir. We also set up arts council funding for a tour of a show based on the book which is at the South Bank Centre on the 31st of October

Translation rights in all territories are available and anyone with a strong women's biography list should consider it post haste! This book deserves to be huge.

Stop Press

Through sub-agent Piergiorgio Nicolazzini at PNLA Editions Calmann Levy in France have secured the French rights to Helen FitzGerald's debut literary crime novel Little Girls and its sequel: Ordinary Moments before an Unexpected Death.

The interest in Helen is growing apace.

Helen FitzGerald - More Territories Secured

During Frankfurt Book Fair week we have finalised deals on Helen FitzGerald's stunning literary crime debut Little Girls with

Helen Francis at Faber & Faber in London Faber's Web Site

Louise Thurtell & Sue Hines at Allen & Unwin in Australia Their Web Site


The book was also featured in forthcoming title promotion information at AmboAnthos who are releasing the book in Dutch next year. Their Literaire Thrillers list is very stylish and includes some of my favourite authors including Jeanette Turner Hospital, Dan Fesperman and Nicci French.

The book is causing a stir among scouts and we have also appointed Piergiorgio Nicolazzini of PNLA in Italy as a subagent in response to the overwhelming interest from Italian publishers.

We hope to be announcing deals in other territories very shortly as interest is growing dramatically. A large number of requests for the manuscript have also come in from the short piece in today's Bookseller.

Jon Fink's New Novel: A Storm in the Blood



An immensely timely and striking book from a very original and distinctive writer...




Title: A Storm in the Blood
Author: Jon S. Fink

Status: Finished M/s available

Rights: World Rights Available

Category: Literary Fiction

About the book: The fifth book by the acclaimed novelist Jon S. Fink takes us back to a dramatic moment in the East End of London nearly a century ago – The Sidney Street Siege. On 17.12.1910 a Jewellers shop H.S. Harris in Houndsditch was burgled at night. A neighbour notified the police. Three unarmed policemen confronted the burglars. All three policemen were shot and killed. Warrants for arrest of the three burglars went out with posters of the three suspects. Two weeks later on 2.1.1911 a Mrs. Gershon of 100 Sidney St. reported at Arbor Square Police Station that three men answering the description of the wanted men have hired a room at her house. The men, sensing they had been betrayed, deprived the landlady of her skirt and boots on the assumption that no religious Jewess would attempt to escape not properly attired. She did. The next day the police surrounded the house. At 7.30am a gun battle ensued and the men refused to surrender. At 10.00am when the men could not be dislodged the Home Secretary - Winston Churchill - summoned the Scots Guard in full battle regalia. After 6 hours (by 4 pm) the house was alight. The charred bodies of Fritz Svaars and Joska Sokoloff aka Joseph Marx were found. The body of the third suspect Peter Piatkov (Peter the Painter) was never found. He vanished without trace and so was born the second legendary East London anti-hero. A Storm in the Blood is his story.

About the Author: Jon S. Fink was born in Philadelphia and raised in Los Angeles. He relocated to Britain in 1978 where he still lives. He is the author of four previous novels:

Further Adventures
“Extraordinary…the novel that’s surprised and intrigued me most this year.” Douglas Adams
Long Pig“A crowded, hugely entertaining novel…” The Times
“A genuinely original book…” Daily Telegraph
If He Lived
“A wonderfully intelligent modern ghost story…” Alexei Sayle, The Guardian
Woke Up Laughing“Funny, poignant and surprising … often wise and excruciatingly true..”
Daily Telegraph
“Painfully Funny…” Daily Mirror

English language and translation rights are all available for his backlist.

Wendy Salisbury deal done with Random House Germany

The German lanugage rights to Wendy Salisbury's provocative memoir The Toy Boy Diet have been bought for Random House after a preemptive offer from Barbara Heinzius.

It's a very affirmative personal account of Wendy's twenty-year diet of toyboys following her divorce at the age of forty. Written to herself as a sixtieth birthday present it is a raunchy and entertaining tale from the author of the classic dating guide for the older woman Move Over, Mrs Robinson