Conville & Walsh Ltd

Conville & Walsh Ltd 

Iqbal Ahmed Maria Alvarez Anil Ananthaswamy 

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Judith Cook Michael Cordy Jane Cumberbatch 

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Smith Vince Smith Ian Stewart Simon Stoddart 

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Ana Tortajada Catherine Townsend Tim 

Tzouladis Ian Urbina Katherine Vaz Harriet 

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Isabel Wolff Andrea Wulf Patrick Wright Adam 

Zeman 

2 Ganton Street, London W1F 7QL 

++44 (0) 20 7287 3030 ++44 (0) 20 7287 4545

AUTUMN 2006 RIGHTS LIST 

Contents 

Fiction 2 

Non-fiction 31 


Frankfurt Book Fair 2006 

For further information about all clients and titles in this catalogue, please contact any of the book 

agents below during the fair in the agents’ centre at B1 and B2, Hall 6 or afterwards at: 


2 Ganton Street 

London 

W1F 7QL 

United Kingdom 

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7287 3030 

Fax: +44 (0) 20 7287 4545 

Directors 

Clare Conville (CBC) – clare@convilleandwalsh.com 

Peter Tallack (PT) – peter@convilleandwalsh.com 

Patrick Walsh (PW) – patrick@convilleandwalsh.com 

Finance Director 

Alan Oliver – alan@convilleandwalsh.com 

Agents 

Ed Jaspers (EJ) – ed@convilleandwalsh.com 

Kevin Conroy Scott (KCS) – kevin@convilleandwalsh.com 

Film & Television Rights 

Sam North (film and television) – sam@samnorth.co.uk 

Assistant Agents 

Sue Armstrong – sue@convilleandwalsh.com 

Jake Smith-Bosanquet – jake@convilleandwalsh.com 

1

FICTION 



2

MIRROR MIRROR 

Maria Alvarez 


Fiction 

Patrick Highsmith meets David Lynch in this psychological thriller 

Christabel is the wife of a wealthy but absentee surgeon and she suffers from an unidentifiable neuropsychological 

disorder which means she is unable to continue her work in an art gallery. Feeling 

alienated as a result of her unhappy childhood and unable to connect with her distant father she hides 

away in her half-finished house where she is becoming increasingly and dangerously isolated. So 

when an apparently chance encounter with Tina, a younger woman who works at the local bar, 

triggers the start of an unusual friendship, their growing bond appears to offer Christabel the chance 

to re-connect with the world around her. 

As Christabel and Tina’s friendship develops into a haze of forbidden substances and unsettling 

desires, more and more boundaries are broken between them. When events finally begin to spiral out 

of control Christabel’s hidden past and lack of insight into the decisions she has made about her life 

finally collide, with devastating results. 

In MIRROR, MIRROR Alvarez explores the nature of sexuality, friendship and betrayal and offers fresh 

insights into how our identities are forged and how dangerous it can be to give oneself up to 'the 

other'. 

Maria Alvarez has written for the Telegraph, Guardian, Sunday Times, Vogue, Tatler and TLS. She is 

currently working on a second novel and a non-fiction project. 

UK Publisher Fig Tree/Penguin 

UK Publication June 2007 

Status Manuscript 

Length 80,000 words 

Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth 

3

GENOPOLIS 

Tess Berry Hart 


Fiction 

Set some four hundred years from now, this novel opens with the secret birth of a baby boy, a 

‘Natural’, in the destitute wastelands outside the city of Genopolis. Abducted at birth, Arlo is brought 

to live among the ‘Citizens’ of the city at an academic institution: the Inns of the Court of Chancery. 

Throughout his early childhood, he is submitted to a number of complex and often painful 

experiments by the doctors who live within its precincts. 

Arlo is a very ordinary boy, but he is soon made aware that somehow he is different, strange and – to 

some of the Citizens – repulsive. We quickly learn that the Citizens have managed to eradicate the 

ability to feel emotional and physical pain, in the belief that if they can’t change the world – by 

eliminating poverty, wars, famine and death – they can at least change their response to it. In so 

doing they have claimed control of the planet, but with disastrous consequences. 

As Arlo grows up it becomes clear that forces outsides the city – some human, some ecological – are 

threatening the planet’s existence. There are growing fears among the more liberal sections of society 

that pain must somehow be re-introduced into their world, so that the Citizens can become alive to 

the world’s problems, many of which they have helped create. Genopolis’s very survival hangs on this. 

Arlo is amazed to discover that, as the ‘Project’, he himself may hold the key to the city’s future, and 

there begins an action-packed but truly emotional journey to discover who he really is and whether he 

can save Genopolis from impending doom. 

A fairy tale set in a wholly believable futuristic world, GENOPOLIS explores urgent contemporary 

issues, such as genetic engineering, the prospect of ecological disaster, and the division of society by 

money and power, in an accessible and vivid way. 

Tess Berry Hart is 30 and writer-in-residence at the Blue Elephant Theatre, London. She is also 

director of the Long Shot Screenwriting Company, and was the British representative at the Young 

European Playwrights Interplay Festival in Warsaw in September 2000 and a student in the prestigious 

Royal Court Young Writers Programme. 

UK Publisher Scholastic 

UK Publication September 2007 



Agent CBC 

World Rights (Scholastic) 

4

BED REST 

Sarah Bilston 

I laughed out loud and I couldn’t put it down 

– Marion Keyes 


Fiction 

Even if you’ve never been pregnant you’ll be as instantly hooked on this addictive novel as I was 

– Plum Sykes 

Prescribe yourself some of the same, so that you can bask in the humour, poignancy and warmth of this 

gorgeous novel 

– Elizabeth Sykes 

Did you know that every year nearly three-quarters of a million women are confined to their beds 

because of complications with their pregnancy? In fact, according to an article in The New York 

Times, a fifth of all pregnant women will spend some time on bed rest. 

In this humorous and touching debut, Sarah Bilston examines what happens to a first-time mother 

who becomes imprisoned owing to prenatal complications. Q is a young English lawyer married to an 

American and living in New York City. She’s ticked off most of the boxes on her list of things-to-dobefore-I’m-30 

and her busy working life has been relatively painless. But when her doctor tells her 

that she must spend the last three months of her pregnancy lying in bed, Q is thrown into a tailspin – 

her manic life must stop and the inertia that follows plunges her relationship with her friends, family 

and husband into murky despair. Can she overcome her doubts about her husband and deliver her 

baby into what is an increasingly uncertain world? 

Sarah Bilston was born and educated in England but now lives with her husband and their daughter 

in Connecticut. Sarah taught women’s studies at Yale University and is now assistant professor of 

English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. She has been published academically and is now 

working on the sequel to BED REST, entitled SLEEPLESS NIGHTS. Check out Sarah’s BED REST blog: 

http://sarahbilston.typepad.com/. 

UK Publisher Time Warner 

US Publisher HarperCollins 

UK Publication March 2007 

Status Proofs 


Agent KCS 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Record), Germany (Rowohlt), Italy (Piemme), 

Japan (Softbank), Netherlands (De Boekerij), Spain (Salamandra), Sweden (Norstedts) 

5

THE GOOD GUY 

John Carbone 


Fiction 

A thirty year epic spanning America and Europe, this is the story of New York’s unlikely first cocaine 

dealers. 

Marco is the youngest of seven young men who wanted to get into the mafia. But that door was 

closed to them, because even though mafia wise guys populated their neighbourhood, the boys were 

not allowed to join. They were meant to go to college, live normal lives, pay taxes. So Marco’s best 

buddy, T.C. formed a gang to sell marijuana. The boys became successful and avoided trouble. But 

Uncle Tony changed all of that… 

And so Marco tells us how he tries to keep his gang safe and how he tap dances around his hero, 

Uncle Tony, who everyone knows is the smartest man in the room and also the most violent. 

This is a rollicking page turner which will appeal to anyone who loves The Sopranos or enjoyed 

Sleepers or Blow. But the real appeal of this book will come to the reader as they are grabbed by the 

Marco’s confession and keep asking themselves: is this really a novel? There is an authenticity to the 

narrative that is hard to ignore. Was Mrs. Dagastino real? Does Uncle Tony exist? And where might 

T.C. be hiding after all this time? 

John Carbone is a fisherman and lives in France. He grew up on the Eastern seaboard of America. 

This is his first novel. 

UK Publisher Headline 

Delivery November 2006 

UK Publication Summer 2007 



Agent KCS 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Italy (Newton & Compton) 

6

THE SOURCE 

Michael Cordy 

Praise for Michael Cordy 


Fiction 

An all-singing, all-dancing cover-to-cover thrills and spills action adventure with a thought-provoking idea at its 

core. What more could you ask for? 

– DAILY MIRROR on TRUE 

Sheer entertainment… Delivers from initial concept through fast action to explosive finale. A masterclass in how 

it’s done. 

– OBSERVER on TRUE 

A taut, gripping thriller 

– THE TIMES on THE MESSIAH CODE 

Explosive… An entertaining tale of non-stop action 

– TORONTO STAR on THE MESSIAH CODE 

All life on Earth today stems from one spark, one place… 

Ambitious geologist Ross Kelly has it all: a lucrative career as an oil search consultant and a beautiful 

wife, Lauren, a brilliant Yale language academic, who has just translated the most mysterious 

document in the world, the legendary 400-year-old Voynich cipher manuscript (a genuine manuscript 

which resides in Yale’s Beinecke Library and has confounded experts for centuries). 

Then an attempt to steal the translation leaves Lauren in a coma, hovering between life and death. 

In the depths of despair, Ross is approached first by a sinister priest and then by a mysterious nun. 

Their obsession with the Voynich manuscript forces him to re-examine the mysterious document, 

which dates back to the conquest of the New World and chronicles the discovery of an ancient place 

so miraculous and terrible that it rewrites the beginning of the bible. To save Lauren he decides to 

abandon everything else in his life and seek out this mythical El jardin del Dios – the garden of god. 

Racing against time and a fanatical priest desperate to claim the garden for his church, Ross’s journey 

leads him to discover one of science’s most holy grails: the source of all life on Earth, an Eden so 

magical and potent that it shatters the certainties of both science and religion. 

Michael Cordy worked for ten years in marketing before giving it all up to write his first novel, THE 

MIRACLE STRAIN (re-titled as THE MESSIAH CODE), which became an international bestseller and 

sold in 25 languages. He is also the author of LUCIFER (retitled as THE LUCIFER CODE), TRUE 

(retitled as THE VENUS CONSPIRACY) and CRIME ZERO. 

UK Publisher Bantam/Transworld 

Delivery December 2006 

UK Publication July 2007 



Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Turkey (Bilge) 

7


Fiction 

THE PORNOGRAPHER OF VIENNA 

Lewis Crofts 

Based on and inspired by the life of the Austrian painter, Egon Schiele. Portrayed here as a young 

hedonist with a burning talent, Schiele is equally remembered in THE PORNOGRAPHER OF VIENNA for 

the raw sexuality of his painting and drawings as he is for the short and fierce life he led. This is also 

a convincing depiction of a crumbling Vienna, just before the First World War changed the city 

forever. 

So this is not only a portrait of a creative genius, but also a view into what life was like for artist in the 

Empire at that time. The novel is people with characters of the time like Gustav Klimt. And Schiele’s 

popularity remains alive today, the recent sale of Sunflowers by Schiele in an auction at Christie’s for 

£11.3 million confirms that he is still very topical indeed. 

Lewis Crofts is 28 years old and lives in Brussels, working as journalist in EU affairs. Lewis grew up 

in Somerset, England, and studied at Oxford and then left the UK to work as a linguist. Since then, 

he’s lived in Germany, Prague, Brussels, and Paris. He translates from French, German and Czech. 

UK Publisher Old Street 


UK Publication November 2007 



Agent KCS 

All rights available excluding world English (Old Street Publishing) 

8


Fiction 

THE EX-BOYFRIEND'S HANDBOOK 

Matt Dunn 

Praise for BEST MAN 

Fast-paced, insightful, and very, very funny 

– HEAT 

Full of great one-liners 

– COMPANY 

A warm, open, and damn funny book 

– LADSMAG 

When Jane, Edward Middleton’s girlfriend of ten years, announces that she’s dumping him to go off 

travelling to ‘find herself’, his world is turned upside down. ‘It’s not me, it’s you,’ she tells him. ‘You’ve 

let yourself go. So I’m letting you go too.’ 

Edward’s shocked by the fact that Jane’s gone, but stunned by the fact that she’s right. Whatever 

happened to the good-looking man-about-town he used to be? Determined to win her back, he knows 

he’s got to do something, and fast. Jane’s back in three months, so it’s time to stop moping, and start 

coping. 

It’s not that women don’t like Edward. Quite the opposite, in fact, but just not in that way. He has to 

find out how to make women fancy him again – if he’s to be Jane’s Mr Right, he needs to turn himself 

into a bit of all right. 

Advised along the way by best friend and serial womanizer Dan, Edward struggles to get to grips with 

the twenty-first-century dating scene, discovering pretty soon that the battle of the sexes isn’t a fair 

fight. And so begins his self-improvement odyssey; through Atkins, Botox, cosmetic dentistry, 

exercise... 

Finally, the three months are up. Has Edward managed the transformation from cuddly Teddy to sexy 

Eddie, and if so, will he be able to win Jane back? Or has his journey of self-discovery taken him in a 

different direction entirely? 

Matt Dunn recently returned to live in the UK from Malaga, where, having sold a recruitment agency, 

he wrote a weekly humour column for the main English-language newspaper in Spain. As a young 

man he was the UK National Lifesaving Champion and a member of the English Swimming Squad. 

Great fun, eloquent, good-looking, Matt Dunn is set to be an exciting new voice in the commercial 

fiction arena. 

UK Publisher Simon & Schuster 

UK Publication 2 October 2006 

Length 320 pages 

Agent PW 


9

HIDDEN 

Katy Gardner 

Praise for Katy Gardner 

A rip-roaring, page-turning psychological drama 

– SUNDAY EXPRESS 

A menacing study of friendship and self-knowledge 

– SUNDAY MIRROR 


Fiction 

A devourable first novel… about the promises and perils of friendship 

– LADSMAG 

Melanie Sykes is in crisis. In the middle of a game of ‘hide and seek’, her seven-year-old daughter 

Poppy has suddenly disappeared. So, she quickly realizes, has Si, her estranged husband. But this is 

no ordinary domestic mix-up. Only a day earlier Si was arrested on suspicion of the murder of one 

woman and the abduction of another. And now, it seems, he has taken Poppy. 

Moving between the present (the police’s search for Poppy) and the past (narrated by Mel as she 

desperately attempts to remember everything that may have contributed to her daughter’s 

disappearance), HIDDEN is both a fast-paced thriller and a study of trust, love and deception, set in 

the melancholic landscape of the East Kent marshes. 

We witness Mel’s attempt to start a new life with the dishevelled and artistic Si in the dilapidated 

warehouse that they are attempting to renovate. Si insists that all they need to do to be happy is put 

the past behind them, but after the birth of their baby son, their relationship rapidly deteriorates. As 

Si becomes increasingly withdrawn and moody, Mel is convinced that he remains involved with Rosa, 

the ex-girlfriend whom he refuses to discuss. Even more disturbingly, the police are circling: 

questioning Si about the recent disappearance of Rosa from her cottage, and the inexplicable murder 

of a young prostitute a year earlier. 

Night sets in. As the police search for Poppy intensifies, Mel is increasingly drawn to the derelict loft 

space at the top of the warehouse. The door at the top is always securely locked, but as she climbs 

the ladder and opens it, the shocking scene that she discovers changes everything. As the novel 

reaches its climax, we realize that, at its heart, the story is less about betrayal than it is about 

revenge. 

Katy Gardner is the author of LOSING GEMMA, which became a publishing sensation, and has sold 

in 18 countries to date. Katie lives with her husband and children in Sussex, where she is a reader in 

anthropology at the University of Sussex. 

UK Publisher Michael Joseph/Penguin 

UK Publication 3 August 2006 


Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Germany (Droemer), Netherlands (De Boekerij) 

10

BOTTLES 

Sarah Hall 

Praise for THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO 

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004 

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004 

Shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2004 

Here is a writer of heart-stopping genius 

– GUARDIAN 


Fiction 

Hall is a writer to indulge, and her sensuous, poetic prose is every bit as evocative as sand poured from a pocket 

at the end of a holiday 

– DAILY MAIL 

Influenced by the paintings of Giorgio Morandi and the early writings of Camus, and written with a 

passionate understanding for the grand artistic follies and small-scale, un-catalogued triumphs of men 

and women, this novel is a wise exploration of the existential, of human emotion and endeavour. 

Italy, in the early 1960s: a reclusive painter dying from lung cancer considers the sacrifices and losses 

that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last Still-Life 

painting, using the same objects that he has for the entire span of his career – a small group of 

bottles. 

Not long afterwards a local blind girl tends his grave, trying to understand the world that she can no 

longer see, and wondering whether the presence she feels nearby is God or the Devil. 

In Cumbria, 30 years later, a young art student – who received letters from the Italian recluse – is a 

painter and eccentric himself, as well as a husband and father, but he has reached a point in life 

where reality and imagination have begun to bleed together. 

And in London, now, a woman struggles to cope with the sudden loss of her twin brother as she 

curates an exhibition of artists’ personal effects. 

Covering half a century, collecting together several unusual narratives, portraits and ideas, and 

tracking the strange journey of one of the original still-life bottles, this fierce novel is about people 

and art, about how we are consoled and draw meaning from our lives, and about the legacies we 

choose to make. 

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974 and lived there until she left home at the age of 18 to study 

for a degree in English and art history at Aberystwyth University. She took a master’s degree in 

creative writing a few years later at St Andrews University and stayed on for a year to teach in the 

university’s undergraduate creative-writing programme. Her first novel, HAWESWATER, was published 

by Faber in 2002 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. Her second novel, 

THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO, also published by Faber, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker 

Prize. 

UK Publisher Faber 

Delivery Autumn 2006 

UK Publication Spring 2007 


Agent CBC 


11

CARHULLAN ARMY 

Sarah Hall 

Praise for THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO 

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004 

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004 

Shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2004 


Fiction 

In this stunning novella Sarah Hall draws on the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell to 

imagine a new dystopia set in the not too distant future. England is in a state of depression after 

global economic collapse: oil and bio-fuels are rationed, electricity is metered, and tinned food is 

shipped over from Christian charities in America. There has been a census and all citizens have now 

been herded into the urban centers. Terrifying new systems of control are in place; not only has the 

government created a military police force to monitor the population, but reproduction has become a 

lottery, with contraceptive coils fitted to every female of child-bearing age. 

The Carhullan Army is a final bastion of the seventies feminist ideal. A girl who will become known 

only as ‘Sister’ escapes the confines of her increasingly repressive marriage to find an isolated group 

of women living as ‘un-officials’ in Carhullan, a remote northern farm. Run by Jackie Nixon, an exsoldier 

now turned libertarian, the organization, once considered sexually eccentric and cult-like, has 

now become something else altogether, and Sister must find out whether she has it in herself to 

become an active insurgent. 

This fascinating novella poses very pertinent questions about 'feminine instincts and capabilities', and 

in a brutalized world it considers what lengths women will go to in order to resist their oppressors, 

what tactics they must employ to survive and remain free. But the story asks a wider and more 

difficult question; under what circumstances might you become a terrorist? 

The Carhullan Army promises to be both a reminder of the early days of great feminist theory and a 

fascinating account of What If… 

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974 and lived there until she left home at the age of 18 to study 

for a degree in English and art history at Aberystwyth University. She took a master’s degree in 

creative writing a few years later at St Andrews University and stayed on for a year to teach in the 

university’s undergraduate creative-writing programme. Her first novel, HAWESWATER, was published 

by Faber in 2002 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. Her second novel, 

THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO, also published by Faber, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker 

Prize. 





Agent CBC 


12

CHILDSBOOK 

Dermot Healy 

Ireland’s finest living novelist 

– Roddy Doyle 


Fiction 

CHILDSBOOK takes place in an unnamed country, devastated by a series of natural disasters that lead 

to the breakdown of law and order and all the physical and emotional certainties that go with them. 

The story follows the life of a young boy as he grows up. Forced to leave his home, he joins up with 

others as they cross a destitute landscape where they endure hunger and hallucinations and deal with 

the hatred and violence of the people they meet. 

When he loses these companions, he struggles to survive alone and returns home. He also mourns a 

particular friend: an older man who has helped and protected him. The boy is desperate to connect 

with him again. 

He finally finds his lost friend and experiences a revelation about the connections between past, 

present and future. 

Their next parting marks the beginning of the boy’s journey, both physical and spiritual, back into the 

partly remembered world of his childhood, which while recognizable, has been transformed into 

something new. 

Dermot Healy is a writer, dramatist, poet and actor. He is the author of BANISHED MISFORTUNE, A 

GOATSONG, FIGHTING WITH SHADOWS, THE BEND FOR HOME (a memoir) and most recently 

SUDDEN TIMES. He lives on the West Coast of Sligo. Ireland. He was the winner of the 2002 America 

Ireland Literary Award, which was funded by the America Ireland Fund and given in recognition of his 

contribution to Irish letters. 


Delivery Spring 2007 

UK Publication tbc 

Length tbc 

Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Canada (MacArthur) 

13

THE VERITY SERIES 

James Holland 

Commissioned by Bantam as a four book deal 


Fiction 

Set throughout the Second World War, the VERITY novels trace the fortunes of Joe Verity and his 

close friend and sidekick, Stan Sykes. This was a confilct unrivalled in terms of human drama, and the 

VERITY series sweeps accross whole continents – from the snowy mountains and fjords of Norway, to 

the sun-scorched deserts of North Africa; from the rocky outcrops of the Apennines to the islands of 

the Mediterranean; and from the bocage of Normandy to the jungles of Burma. As well as these 

different campaigns and theatres offering a variety of landscapes and conditions in which Verity finds 

himself, the fortunes of the British Army through the war are played out in the background. 

Despite the cutbacks, complacency and reversion to colonial-style fighting, which had meant that by 

1939 Britain’s Army was in a parlous state; and despite defeats in Norway, Dunkirk, Singapore and the 

Mediterranean, gradually – painfully – she learnt her lessons. Tactics, equipment and technology all 

improved through the long and bitter years of war. This progress is charted through the fortunes of 

Verity’s King’s Royal London Guards – a classic infantry regiment. 

Appealing to the same Bernard Cornwell, Andy McNab, Allan Mallinson and HORNBLOWER market, the 

series is also inspired by classic Second World War films: Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, 

and other Alistair Maclean adaptations. Brimming with Jamie Holland's scrupulous attention to 

historical detail and accuracy, the VERITY series is a fast-paced mixture of action, intrigue and 

derring-do. 

James Holland is the author of two novels: THE BURNING BLUE, which is set against the backdrop 

of the Battle of Britain, and A PAIR OF SILVER WINGS, both published by Heinemann. In 2003, he 

published his first work of history, FORTRESS MALTA, which became a Sunday Times top 10 

bestseller. The sequel, TOGETHER WE STAND: North Africa 1942-1943, was published this year. 

James has also been working for three years on his most ambitious non-fiction book to date: a 

panoramic account of the last year of the Second World War in Italy. Provisionally entitled ITALY'S 

SORROW, it will be published in Spring 2008 by HarperCollins UK. He is 36. 

UK Publisher Bantam 

Delivery September 2007 

UK Publication April 2008 

Status Proposal 


Agent PW 


14

CRUSADERS 

Richard T. Kelly 


Fiction 

A remarkable first novel from the film journalist behind Sean Penn’s authorized biography 

Set largely in Newcastle upon Tyne during the autumn and winter of 1996/1997, CRUSADERS 

chronicles the intertwined lives of four disparate individuals drawn together by circumstance… and 

with tragic consequences. 

With its strong narrative involving the Church, organized crime and politics, the novel paints a detailed 

portrait of the northeast of England, its industrial heritage and its distinctive social and political 

character – and in doing so says something of where we are today. 

Richard T. Kelly was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1970, and grew up in Northern Ireland. He is 

the author of two well-regarded books on television and film history, ALAN CLARKE and THE NAME OF 

THIS BOOK IS DOGME 95, and of the highly acclaimed SEAN PENN: His Life and Times (Faber, 2004). 





Agent KCS 


15

MOUSE NOSES ON TOAST 

Daren King 


Fiction 

Acclaimed cult novelist Daren King’s first work for children 

Paul the mouse is allergic to cheese. Whenever he visits his mouse friends under the human 

restaurant, he refuses to sit on their cheese furniture because it makes the fur on his bottom fall off. 

When Paul and his friends Tinby and Angela go out for a meal they discover that the humans are 

enjoying a new delicacy: mouse noses on toast. Paul gathers together some friends and protests 

against this mouse abuse, ultimately journeying to the factory where the delicacies are made, with 

unexpected results. 

Knowing, naive and charming, this is King at his most imaginative and hilarious. Fans of Philip 

Ardagh’s books will be delighted to know that his distinctive illustrator, David Roberts, worked on this 

title too. 

Daren King was born in 1972 in Harlow, Essex. He was educated at Bath Spa University College, 

Bath, where he graduated in creative studies. He is the author of three novels: BOXY AN STAR, which 

was shortlisted for the 1999 Guardian First Book Award; JIM GIRAFFE; and TOM BOLER, which was 

published in May 2005. 



Length 96 pages with b/w illustrations 

Agent KCS 


16

A CHRISTMAS CAROL 

Illustrated by P.J. Lynch 


Fiction 

P.J. Lynch is one of the most talented and revered illustrators working today. He has won many 

awards, including the Mother Goose Award; the Irish Bisto Award twice; and the Kate Greenaway 

Medal twice, in 1995 for The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey and again in 1997 for When Jesse 

Came Across the Sea. ‘I’ve been thinking of illustrating A CHRISTMAS CAROL for many years’, says 

P.J. ‘When I lived in Brighton, I used to walk daily past a gravestone belonging to a man named 

Ebenezer Robbins, who died on Christmas Day, 1842. In my mind, I felt sure that this man must have 

in some way inspired Dickens to create Ebenezer Scrooge in 1843. And I knew that one day I would 

illustrate this extraordinary story’. 

UK Publisher Walker Books 

UK Publication October 2006 


Agent CBC 

World rights: Walker Books Ltd 

17

THE STORM PROPHET 

Hector Macdonald 


Fiction 

In the time I knew the boy called Moses, he made three terrible predictions. The first was his own death; the 

last was something personal to me. But the prediction everyone still talks about is the Sydney Hobart storm. 

– Extract from THE STORM PROPHET 

Planned as the first title of a series of female adventure thrillers based around a main character called 

Petra – an incredibly competent but emotionally vulnerable off-shore coastguard – THE STORM 

PROPHET takes place against the backdrop of the Boxing Day Sydney to Hobart yacht race, and the 

terrifying prediction concerning it made by a young 'precognitive' boy from South Africa. 

As the race looms ever closer, Petra finds herself drawn into it both profesionally, as a lifeguard, and 

emotionally – for her best friend of many years, Kirsten, is both sponsoring and crewing a competing 

boat, The Sentinel. 

How seriously must the boy's prediction be taken, with so many lives at stake? Does Kirsten have 

ulterior motives in her insistence on continuing with the race? And can Petra trust her boyfriend, Billy, 

who himself has started working for Kirsten? In its wake Petra is forced to question everything she 

has ever believed about people and how and why they act. 

With its nail-biting central scene – the race itself – THE STORM PROPHET is a pacey, psychological 

thriller that asks questions about faith, trust and human motives. 

Hector Macdonald wrote two novels whilst in his mid-twenties: THE MIND GAME, which sold into 23 

languages and caused quite a stir when published by Penguin UK in 2000; and then in 2003, THE 

HUMMINGBIRD SAINT, rights to which again sold widely. Now 33, Hector began the research for THE 

STORM PROPHET back in December 2002, when he lived in Sydney, discovered Pittwater and 

watched the Sydney to Hobart race from afar. He lives and works in London as a freelance 

management consultant. 

Australian Publisher Penguin Australia 

Australian Publication September 2007 



Agent PW 

All rights available excluding ANZAC (Penguin) 

18

IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN 

Hisham Matar 

Shortlisted for the 2006 Booker Prize 

Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 

Sold in 19 lanuages 


Fiction 

A poignant story of a child exposed too early to the brutalities of Libyan politics 

– J.M. Coetzee 

IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN understands that love - despite betrayal, grief, mistrust, rage, political terror - 

nevetheless remains love 

– Anne Michaels, author of FUGITIVE PIECES 

A coming-of-age story, IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN is narrated by Sulieman, nine years old and living 

peacefully in a Tripoli neighbourhood with his mother and father. But in Libya during the late 1970s 

Qaddafi is known less as a revolutionary liberator and more as a cold-blooded dictator. Sulieman’s 

father, a successful merchant, is often away on business. During these periods his mother drinks 

heavily and tells Suleiman stories about how she was married as a teenager, against her will. It is at 

those moments that Sulieman thinks that he can protect his mother and save her from her ‘illness’. 

When the family’s neighbour is taken by the secret police, Sulieman discovers that the student-led 

revolt is closer to home than he was led to believe by his parents. Soon thereafter his father is taken, 

with disastrous consequences for his family and their friends. 

In an Arab country governed by stifling religious traditions and an oppressive dictatorship, this is the 

story of a family coming face to face with its own powerlessness in the world. Hisham Matar’s real 

achievement here is the restraint and humanity of his writing, something that is at once both powerful 

and moving. 

Hisham Matar was born in New York in 1970 to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in 

Tripoli and then in Cairo. He has lived in London since 1986 and is currently at work on his second 

novel. 

UK Publisher Viking 

US Publisher Dial Press/Random House 

UK Publication 6 July 2006 


Agent KCS 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Arab (Dar Al-Muna), Brazil (Companhia das Letras), 

Canada (Penguin), Catalan (RBA), Croatia (Algoritam), Denmark (Gyldendal), France (Denoël), Germany 

(Bertelsmann/Goldman), Iceland (JPV), Israel (Keter), Italy (Einaudi), Japan (Poplar), Netherlands (Meulenhoff), 

Norway (Cappelen), Portugal (Civilizacao Editora), Slovenia (Ucila International), Spain (Salamandra), Slovenia 

(Ucilia International), Sweden (Forum) 

Offers pending: Turkey 

19

THE GREAT SPACE RACE 

Joshua Mowll 


Fiction 

"Kids, that’s one small bid on the Internet, and one giant leap for the Crankshaws." And with that 

terrible proclamation, our troubles really began.' 

Arthur Crankshaw, father of 6 uncontrollable children, bids his last £1 for an archaic British rocket 

called the ‘Ginger Arrow’. His plan – to enter a space competition run by the Zircon corporation for 

the first amateur satellite launch. The prize is a staggering $10 million, enough to save Crankshaw 

from prison for financial crimes he didn’t commit, and his family from destitution. In doing so, he also 

inadvertently launches his family on an adventure of truly global proportions, something none of 

children are particularly thankful for. 

The Ginger Arrow is at first ridiculed but ultimately lauded, as the world realises the competition is 

merely a cover for Zircon’s evil intentions and the elderly British rocket is their only viable chance of 

salvation. From a caravan park in Gravesend to 10 Downing Street, the Oval Office, and ultimately 

space itself, this is a David and Goliath story whereby 12 year old Ace, with the help or hindrance of 

his brothers and sisters, triumphs against the odds: to save the world, keep his family together and 

his father out of prison. 

Joshua Mowll began his career as a graphic artist for the Mail on Sunday in 1994. Since then he has 

illustrated and drawn everything from space flights, medical procedures and aircraft crashes to ancient 

pyramid theories, invasions, SAS assaults and laser-guided weaponry. Joshua's first novel, 

OPERATION RED JERICHO, was published to much fanfare by Walker Books in 2005, and is to be 

followed by two sequels, TYPHOON SHORE and STORM CITY. 



UK Publication tbc 

Length tbc 

Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding [offer pending] 

20

OPERATION TYPHOON SHORE 

The Guild Trilogy – Book Two 

Joshua Mowll 


Fiction 

Praise for OPERATION RED JERICHO: The Guild Trilogy – Book One 

A ripping yarn, artfully told with amazing maps and designs 

– MAIL ON SUNDAY 

Mowll’s genius is in his clever use of mixing old and new storytelling devices in a story that should appeal to both 

boys and girls 

– SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST 

Captain MacKenzie and the crew of the Honourable Guild of Specialist’s research ship Expedient battle 

through a savage storm in pursuit of their sworn enemy Julius Pembleton-Crozier who is hard at work 

excavating on an archipelago in the Celebes Sea, east of Borneo. Our heroes, Rebecca and Douglas 

MacKenzie, are still aboard and hell-bent on uncovering the fate of their parents, explorers lost in the 

desert wastes of eastern China. This archipelago lies at the heart of the mystery and reveals clues to 

the past of both the Guild and the Sujing Quantou, the Chinese fighting order allied to the captain. 

As Becca and Doug uncover vital information about their parents’ missing expedition, they encounter 

vast tunneling machines, seaplanes, a Greek trireme, volcanoes and a terrifying generator based on 

the design of the enigmatic ‘gyrolabe’ seen in Book One. With the Expedient stranded and in need of 

urgent repairs, it is a shock for the captain to discover that Pembleton-Crozier is in league with the 

Kalaxx, the miscreant northern chapter of the Sujing, shunned by their brotherhood after the bloody 

internecine war of AD 1720. The islands are the ancient source of the potent element zoridium which 

the Kalaxx are intent on using to power a new scientific dawn for mankind. Zoridium is the ancient 

secret both the Guild and the Sujing Quantou have sworn to protect and guard from the world, such is 

its terrifying potential for both good and evil… 

Resplendent with plans, cutaway drawings, photographs and artefacts, this book builds on the 

foundations laid down in OPERATION RED JERICHO, the first part of The Guild Trilogy. 

Joshua Mowll began his career as a graphic artist for the Mail on Sunday in 1994. Since then he has 

illustrated and drawn everything from space flights, medical procedures and aircraft crashes to ancient 

pyramid theories, invasions, SAS assaults and laser-guided weaponry. The sequel to TYPHOON SHORE 

will be STORM CITY, to be published in autumn 2007. 


US Publisher Candlewick 



Length 280 pages (with illustrations) 

Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Candlewick), Australia (Walker Books), Belgium 

(Standaard), Croatia (Biovega), Educational Rights (Longman), France (Flammarion), French Canadian (Editions 

Imagine), Hungary (Orlando Studio), Italy (RCS), Japan (Sony), Netherlands (Standaard), Poland (Muchomor) 

World rights: Walker Books. For further information please contact Véronique Kirchhoff: 

veronique.kirchhoff@walker.co.uk or Caroline Muir: caroline.muir@walker.co.uk 

For film rights contact Bob Bookman or Richard Green at Creative Artists Agency (tel: +1 310 288 4545) 

20


Fiction 

THE INFERIOR 

Being Book I of THE BONE TRILOGY 

Peadar O'Guilin 

Every so often something very original, apparently simple and special comes along. That quality of originality is so 

rare and so vital that the only thing a publisher has to do is to recognise it and act! These are the books you 

must, must publish. You never know what it is going to be, NORTHERN LIGHTS, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF 

THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME, THE VARIOUS, THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS and now THE INFERIOR... 

– David Fickling, Publisher 

Alien races are hunting mankind to extinction through the ruins of a vast city. Poisons are everywhere, 

but a simple rule keeps the survivors going: if it's intelligent, it's food – the same species that savour 

human flesh make good eating themselves. 

And then one day, a girl falls out of the sky and lands amongst the tribe. Can she save them from 

destruction? Or has she brought it with her? One young man, seen by his people as little more than a 

stuttering imbecile, aims to find out. First, he'll have to guide the stranger through a fascinating world 

teeming with ravenous aliens. 

The Inferior is the first title in an action packed trilogy for young adults. The story's setting cries out 

to be explored and the struggles and triumphs of its hero and heroine will fill the reader's daydreams 

for years to come. 

Books II and II of THE BONE TRILOGY are due for delivery in June 2007 and June 2008 respectively. 

Peadar O'Guilin grew up in Donegal on the beautiful West Coast of Ireland. His strange short stories 

have been appearing for years in Speculative Fiction magazines and anthologies around the world. 

UK Publisher David Fickling/Random House 





Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, Denmark (Sesam/Aschehoug), France (Panama), Germany 

(Bertlesmann), Italy (RCS), Korea (BIR), Russia (Tarna) 

21

HAMDRYAD 

Ruth Padel 


Fiction 

HAMDRYAD takes place in the six months around the London bombings of July 2005. Alan, a field 

zoologist in south Asia, is married to a successful UK actress, Irena, but has always fantasized about 

her friend Rosamund, married to London music promoter and serial philanderer Tyler, who is himself 

having a secret affair with a Greek singer. 

Brought up in a Greek village, the singer sees clearly the international perspective and consequences 

of the war in Iraq for London. But, locked into her affair, she sees everything through the lens of her 

own pain. After the failed bombings, she is upset the terrorists were children of asylum seekers, 

because emotionally she sought asylum in the UK too. She’s never let her village family know she has 

an illegitimate child. 

Rosamund and Tyler’s teenage son is the book’s symbolic centre. Unbeknown to them, he lives 

dangerously, threatened by drugs and gangs, and as the narrative unfolds we follow the journey to 

rescue him. 

As a backdrop to the story, the perspectives of wild animals form a vital unconsidered presence, from 

a fox and an owl in an English back garden to a leopard and a king cobra in India. The watching 

animals deepen our perspectives of the story’s human characters, who believe that the world they live 

in is their own… 

Ruth Padel is one of Britain’s leading poets. She has won the UK National Poetry Competition and 

published five poetry collections; three have been a Poetry Book Society Choice or Recommendation. 

VOODOO SHOP was published by Chatto & Windus and shortlisted for two of the UK’s three major 

poetry prizes: the Whitbread and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her sixth collection, THE SOHO LEOPARD, 

appeared in spring 2004. Also a well-known critic and journalist, Ruth writes arts and wildlife features 

as well as book reviews for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Times, New York 

Times, Independent on Sunday, Independent, Literary Review and Prospect. For three years she 

wrote a weekly poetry discussion column in the Independent on Sunday; which was collected in the 

book 52 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POEM. She now writes a monthly wildlife column, ‘Wild Thing’, in 

the Saturday Times. Her first work of narrative non-fiction, TIGERS IN RED WEATHER, was published 

by Time Warner in June 2005. 


Delivery June 2007 



Agent PW 


22

LUDMILA'S BROKEN ENGLISH 

DBC Pierre 

Praise for VERNON GOD LITTLE 


Fiction 

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2003 

Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award for Comic Fiction 2003 

Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 2003 

Not since reading John Kennedy O’Toole’s masterpiece A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES twenty years ago have I 

laughed so much or felt such sheer delight at the discovery of a wholly fresh comic voice 

– Craig Brown, MAIL ON SUNDAY 

Assured, impassioned and chilling… a dark masterpiece 

– SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 

[Vernon is] not just a rebel for the Eminem generation, but a boy of such sweetness he makes death row a 

respectable address 

– INDEPENDENT 

As Russia’s Caucuses fall into bloody chaos, a separatist conflict takes hold of the tiny Special 

Administrative Region of Ublilsk. With its agricultural land spoiled and its only factory abandoned, the 

death of the Barzukov family patriarch means one of its children must leave to secure the family’s 

future. Only brazen, battle-hardened young Ludmila has any education. She even speaks a little 

English. 

Britain’s privatization is almost complete. As the darkest crannies of the National Health Service are 

scrubbed and readied for new ownership, the last handful of unfortunates from the Empire House 

Institution is prepared for integration into the community. Of these, Ray and Claud-Marie are the last 

to emerge. They have much living to catch up on. For Ray, this means finding a woman – a soft, 

servile girl to share his newfound love of himself. None such exist in New Britain. But there’s always 

the Web… 

Irreverently symbolic of the affluent West’s search of endorsement and satisfaction among the world’s 

hungry, LUDMILA’S BROKEN ENGLISH is a tragic romance in the age of globalization. 

DBC Pierre has worked as a designer and cartoonist, and currently lives in Ireland. His first novel, 

VERNON GOD LITTLE, won the 2003 Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award, the 2003 Whitbread 

Prize for Best First Novel, and the 2003 Man Booker Prize, and is sold in 43 countries. 


US Publisher Norton 

UK Publication 2 March 2006 


Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Norton), Brazil (Record), Czech Rep (Euromedia), 

Denmark (Hr. Ferdinand), France (Editions du Panama), Germany (Aufbau), Greece (Ellinika Grammata), Israel 

(Matar), Italy (Giulio Einaudi), Latvia (Zvaigzne), Netherlands (Podium), Norway (Cappelen), Russia (Tarna 

Enterprises), Sweden (Alfabeta) 

23

VERNON GOD LITTLE 

DBC Pierre 

Praise for VERNON GOD LITTLE 


Fiction 

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2003 

Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award for Comic Fiction 2003 

Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 2003 

Not since reading John Kennedy O’Toole’s masterpiece A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES twenty years ago have I 

laughed so much or felt such sheer delight at the discovery of a wholly fresh comic voice 

– Craig Brown, MAIL ON SUNDAY 

Assured, impassioned and chilling… a dark masterpiece 

– SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 

[Vernon is] not just a rebel for the Eminem generation, but a boy of such sweetness he makes death row a 

respectable address 


Set in the barbecue-sauce capital of Texas in the aftermath of a high-school massacre, VERNON GOD 

LITTLE is peopled by a cast of grotesques, freaks, cold-blooded chattering housewives (all 

mysteriously widowed) and one very special adolescent with an unfortunate talent for being in the 

wrong place at the wrong time. It is a riotous adventure story which cuts a satirical swathe through 

the heart of contemporary America. 

DBC Pierre has worked as a designer and cartoonist, and currently lives in Ireland. His first novel, 

VERNON GOD LITTLE, won the 2003 Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award, the 2003 Whitbread 

Prize for Best First Novel, and the 2003 Man Booker Prize, and is sold in 43 countries. 


US Publisher Canongate US 

UK Publication 20 January 2003 


Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Canongate), Bangladesh (Sandesh), Brazil (Record), 

Bulgaria (Iztok-Zapok), China (Ten Points Publishing, complex characters; Yilin, simplified characters), Croatia 

(Marjan Sare), Czech Republic (Euromedia), Denmark (Hr Ferdinand), Estonia (Pegasus), France (Editions du 

Seuil), Georgia (Bakur Sulakauri), Germany (Aufbau), Greece (Ellinika Grammata), Hungary (Ulpius Haz), Iceland 

(Bjatur), Indonesia (Fresh Book), Israel (Matar), Italy (Einaudi), Japan (Sony), Korea (Daehan), Latvia (Zvaigzne), 

Lithuania (Tyto Alba), Macedonia (Terra Magica-Skopje), Netherlands (Podium), Norway (Cappelen), Poland 

(Muza), Portugal (Gradiva), Romania (Humanitas), Russia (Rosmen), Serbia & Montenegro (Alfa Narodna), 

Slovenia (Ucila International), Spain (Destino; Catalan), Sweden (Alphabeta), Thailand (Poema), Turkey (Plan B), 

Yugoslavia (Alfa-Narodna) 

Film rights: Aimee Peyronet, Wild Child Films 

Abridged audio rights: Faber/Penguin; unabridged audio rights: F. W. Howes; World stage rights (excluding 

Germany): Cuba Pictures Ltd 

24

THE GUILT OF INNOCENTS 

Candace Robb 

Book Nine in the Owen Archer Series 

Praise for Candace Robb 


Fiction 

It's... the Machiavellian intrigue that makes this such an enjoyable read. When the iron curtain came down people 

said the spy-thriller genre was dead. They were wrong. This is as full of intrigue as a Deighton or a Le Carré 

– GUARDIAN 

A gripping whodunnit full of colour and atmosphere 

– TIME OUT 

Set in the winter of 1372, in York, a man has drowned in the Ouse after a skirmish with some boys 

from St Peter's School. It soon becomes clear that his death was not an accident – he has been 

poisoned. But why would a humble pilot on the river be killed for possessing a young boy's purse? 

Suspicion falls on Father Nicholas Ferriby – Vicar of Weston and master of a small grammar school – 

who has already offended many with his unpopular beliefs. But is he really a murderer? One-eyed spy, 

Owen Archer, Captain of Archbishop Thoresby's guard and noted for solving many crimes, is quickly 

brought to the scene by his adoptive son, Jasper. Clear that the pilot has been killed for more than a 

purse, an increasingly cantankerous Thoresby reluctantly agrees to let Owen investigate the man's 

murder. Torn between solving the crime and looking after his wife, Lucy, who is expecting their longawaited 

third child, Owen is soon taken away from home. When another man is found dead in the 

river and Owen and Jasper get nearer to the truth, they find their own lives in jeopardy... 

Candace Robb studied for a PhD in Medieval and Anglo-Saxon literature and has continued to read, 

research and lecture on medieval history and literature ever since. Her first collection of novels, the 

Owen Archer series, grew out of a fascination with the city of York and the tumultuous fourteenth 

century; the first in the series, THE APOTHECARY ROSE, was published in 1994, at which point she 

began to write full time. There are now nine Owen Archer novels. 

UK Publisher Heinemann 

UK Publication 4 January 2007 

Status Proofs 


Agent PW 


25

GEMX 

Nicky Singer 

Praise for FEATHER BOY 

Winner of the Blue Peter Book Award 


Fiction 

Each copy should come with a torch for a spellbinding midnight conclusion 

– DAILY TELEGRAPH 

BAFTA Award 2004 Best Children’s Drama – television series 

Set in a future where the city of Polis is divided into the genetic elite (the Enhanced) and those less 

fortunate (the Naturals or the Dreggies, depending on your point of view), GEMX tells the story of two 

teenage boys who live on opposites sides of the tracks. Maxo Strang is a GemX (the latest version of 

the Enhanced). He lives a protected life of perfection and food pills, ambi-suits and virtual date 

palaces. Stretch is an angry young man from a Dreggie estate. He owns nothing, not even a proper 

name. But what’s really gnawing at him is the loss of his father who went ‘missing’ after responding to 

the call for ‘clean genes’ to support the city’s Clodrone programme. 

Between the two boys is Gala, a young girl from the estates whose mother is dying of a disease that 

those with genetic protection no longer die from – so there are few available drugs, and what drugs 

there are, are prohibitively expensive. Gala has no money. 

One day Maxo Strang sees something strange on his perfectly formed GemX face – a sort of line at 

the edge of his right eye. The only place he’s seen something so horrible before is on old Naturals 

(the Enhanced have a life expectancy of 130 years) – and he thinks these cracks are called ‘wrinkles’. 

What can be happening to him? It soon becomes clear it’s not just Maxo’s problem: MediAlert has 

logged 11,000 Web hits from concerned GemXs. And it’s not just physical degradation the GemXs are 

suffering: something is also beginning to happen to their minds, something that makes Enhanced 

Maxo fall helplessly in love with a Dreggie face that he sees on a securi-screen. The face is Gala’s… 

At one level GEMX is a fast-paced futuristic adventure story. What is really happening to Maxo? Will 

Gala be able to save her mother? Can Stretch find his father? Who is going to fall in love with whom? 

At another level it’s about whether our technological capabilities are about to outstrip our morality and 

cause an unbridgeable gulf between Haves and Have-Nots – and what really makes us human. 

Nicky Singer has published four adult novels, two works of non-fiction and two highly acclaimed 

children’s novels, FEATHER BOY and DOLL. She lives in Sussex with her husband and three children. 

UK Publisher Oxford University Press 

US Publisher Holiday House 




Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Holiday House) 

World English rights: Oxford University Press 

26

THE STARLIGHT CONSPIRACY 

Steve Voake 

Praise for THE DREAMWALKER'S CHILD 


Fiction 

An ingenious and fast-paced thriller… [Voake's] book buzzes and hums with ideas 

– THE TIMES 

Ingenious premise, relentless pace and a sprinkling of thought-provoking philosophy – I loved it 

– Herbie Brennan 

You must do it, Berry. You must believe me when I tell you that the safety of the world depends on you returning 

this item. So please. Just say that you’ll do it. 

– Extract from THE STARLIGHT CONSPIRACY 

Alone and on the run from Social Services, 14-year-old Berry has nowhere to go. Until she meets an 

old man who entrusts her with a package containing a mysterious item that has unbelievable powers. 

It is a meeting that will change her life, for other people also want the item and will stop at nothing to 

get it. Pursued by the FBI and a vicious terrorist group, Berry hides out at the Glastonbury music 

festival, where she meets fellow outcast, Elliott. Escaping over the Atlantic, they soon find themselves 

dodging bullets in a desperate race across America. But what is in the package? And why is it so 

important? 

Hunted through cities and deserts, Berry knows that she must stay alive long enough to find the 

item’s rightful owner – whoever, or whatever, they may be. 

In his third book for Faber & Faber, Steve Voake departs from the Highly successful Aurobon setting 

of THE DREAMWALKER’S CHILD and its sequel, THE WEB OF FIRE, to pen this fast-paced stand-alone 

YA thriller. The two teenagers at its core share the ultimate road trip – with Berry saddling up a Harley 

Davidson as soon as the pair hit US soil – and must use all their resourcefulness and inner strength to 

complete the mysterious task entrusted to them. With the deftness that made his first two novels so 

memorable, Voake balances a high-octane plot with a sensitive meditation on friendship, belonging 

and finding ones place in the world. 

Steve Voake was formerly headmaster of Kilmersdon Primary School in Somerset, before recently 

leaving to focus on writing full time. He lives near Bath with his wife and two children. 



Status Proofs 


Agent EJ 


27


Fiction 

A LIGHT-HEARTED LOOK AT MURDER 

Mark Watson 

Praise for BULLET POINTS 

unnervingly accomplished 

– OBSERVER 

a fledgling Nabokov for the era of Big Brother 

– Boyd Tonkin in his roundup of 2004’s best books for the INDEPENDENT 

When German student, Andreas Hönig, arrives to study late-Romantic literature at Cambridge in the 

mid 1980s, he hopes to discover what kind of man he wants to be. Leaving behind in Berlin a father 

who has never recovered from his wife’s sudden death and a younger brother who is becoming 

increasingly involved with right-wing causes, Andreas has no idea that before a year is out he will be 

earning his living as a Hitler impersonator. Uncomfortable at first, he begins to reason that, by demystifying 

Hitler through comedy, he can help Germans to come to terms with their guilt and help the 

British to understand better the German mentality. 

Andreas meets and falls in love with Rose, an improbably tall fellow student, and after graduation they 

set up a look-alike agency – supplying performers who resemble celebrities for corporate 

entertainment and comedy clubs. Andreas’ Hitler act is the most successful of them all, but sickened 

that Rose increasingly expects to be dominated by ‘Hitler’ in bed and confronted by his brother’s neonazism, 

he decides to hang up the moustache at the height of his success. It proves to be a 

disastrous move, culminating in a final, drunken bout of violent love-making which leaves Rose dead 

and Andreas imprisoned for manslaughter. 

It is not until the present day that Andreas is able to tell his story to Alexandra, a young literacy 

assistant at the prison where he lives out a life sentence. Alexandra has her own complicated personal 

life to come to terms with but teams up with her flatmate and reluctant love-interest, Gareth, to 

translate and unpick the bizarre story. As they get closer to the truth, they discover that the gap 

between impersonation and emulation, between role-play and real-life, between comedy and 

something far darker, is all to easily crossed. 

Mark Watson is a phenomenally successful stand-up comedian in the UK who has won numerous 

awards and is a cornerstone of the Edinburgh International Comedy Festival, where this year he 

stunned critics with a marathon 36-hour comedy show. At the same time as forging a career as a 

performer, Mark has established himself as a serious literary voice with his debut novel, BULLET 

POINTS, in 2004, which attracted highly impressive reviews across the board. Now 26, Mark is 

researching his third novel – a portrait of a professor obsessed with cryogenics and of the quasireligious 

cult he builds around himself in the quest to live forever. 

UK Publisher Chatto & Windus 





Agent EJ 


28


Fiction 

ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL 

MANNER OF THINGS SHALL BE WELL 

Tod Wodicka 

ALL SHALL BE WELL... is the story of a 63 year-old American widower who finds dealing with the 

modern world and the demands of its people very difficult. 

The selfish but vulnerable Burt Hecker retreats into a world of his own, a world represented by the 

timeless pursuit of medieval re-enactment. As he attends a workshop in Germany with a group of 

middle-aged chant workshop women, we learn that Burt has recently sold the family’s Mansion Inn 

back in New York and that his ticket to Europe is one way: Burt is bent on finding his beloved son, 

Tristan, in Prague. As he travels east we go back in time to see how his family came together and 

how it fell apart. 

In this ambitious debut, Wodicka places himself at the forefront of the great young American stylists 

working today and has drawn favorable comparisons to Jonathan Safran Foer. 

Tod Wodicka is 30, an American living in Berlin who attended the University of Manchester. He is 

currently in the planning stages of his semi-autobiographical second novel, THE HOUSEHOLD SPIRIT, 

about a failed songwriter in his early thirties who moves home with his gay father, a paranormal 

investigator. 

UK Publisher Jonathan Cape 

US Publisher Pantheon/Knopf 


UK Publication August 2007 



Agent KCS 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam) 

29

FORGET-ME-NOT 

Isabel Wolff 

Anna Temple is about to start a new life… 


Fiction 

It’s just not quite the one she had in mind. After the sudden death of her mother, Anna realises she 

must live for the moment. Swapping hedge funds for herbaceous borders, and shares for scented 

stocks, she leaves the City to fulfil her dream of becoming a garden designer, a tribute to her greenfingered 

mother. 

But on the eve of her sparkling new future, she meets Xan. Their chance encounter changes her world 

in more ways that she can have ever imagined – enter baby Milly, nine months later. Juggling her new 

business with new motherhood is a struggle, especially alone. 

Meanwhile, Anna’s father has moved to London to escape his memories. But he’s begun acting rather 

strangely. Neither Anna nor her incorrigible younger sister Cassie can figure out what he’s up to. 

Then Anna discovers a long-buried family secret - and some news about the new man in her life - and 

skeletons tumble from the closet and the past rears its ugly head. Suddenly nothing is as it seems, 

past or present… 

Isabel Wolff is the author of five internationally bestselling novels, THE TRIALS OF TIFFANY TROTT, 

THE MAKING OF MINTY MALONE, OUT OF THE BLUE, RESCUING ROSE and BEHAVING BADLY, which 

have sold in over 15 territories worldwide. She is also a journalist and broadcaster. She lives in 

London. 

UK Publisher HarperCollins 



Agent CBC 


30

NON-FICTION 



31


Non-fiction 

TO THE EDGE OF REASON 

Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology 

Anil Ananthaswamy 

This is the story of extreme physics – both intellectually and physically. In it, the science writer Anil 

Ananthaswamy takes readers on a tour de horizon of the sites of some of the most extraordinary 

detectors and telescopes ever assembled. By reporting on work going on in the coldest, most arid 

deserts, on remote mountain tops or thousands of metres underground, he builds up a unique portrait 

of the universe and our quest to understand it. 

At the heart of his portrait are profiles of the scientists who work in these extreme environments to 

unravel the secrets of the cosmos. While reflecting on what it is that drives them in their quest to 

construct a complete picture of the universe, Anil Ananthaswamy presents an insider’s view of the 

lives, works and personalities of legendary figures in the history of astronomy as well as of the 

researchers who are formulating the latest cosmological theories. Reporting back from some of the 

most inhospitable and dramatic research sites on our planet (from, for example, the Atacama Desert 

in Chile, the Indian Observatory in the Himalayas, and deep within abandoned iron mines in 

Minnesota), he weaves together stories that are as much about the science and technology as they 

are about the people and places that make such research possible – and, in so doing, provides a 

unique up-to-date primer on the frontiers of modern physics. 

Drawing on interviews and personal anecdotes, the writing is atmospheric, engaging and illuminating, 

depicting science as a human process and, in a sense, bringing cosmology with all of its rarefied 

concepts down to earth. 

Anil Ananthaswamy is deputy news editor at New Scientist in London. He has worked at the 

magazine since 2000, during which time he has contributed more than 160 news and features articles. 

He also writes fiction (he has a novel under commission from Penguin India), and has published a 

short story. He studied electronics, electrical and computer engineering at the Indian Institute of 

Technology, Madras (Bachelor of Technology) and the University of Washington, Seattle (Master of 

Science), and worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley before training as a journalist in the 

University of California Santa Cruz’s renowned science-writing programme. 

US Publisher Houghton Mifflin 


US Publication Autumn 2008 

Status Proposal and sample chapter 

Length 80,000-90,000 words 

Agent PT 

All rights available excluding US (Houghton Mifflin) 

32


Non-fiction 

EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK 

A Woman's Guide 

Francesca Beauman 

EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK: A Woman's Guide is a definitive new handbook of women’s 

customs, habits and pursuits. A witty distillation of current wisdom relating to twenty-first century life, 

its key is the visually attractive manner in which the information is presented. Crammed with facts, 

figures, diagrams, lists, tables, flow charts, pie charts, Venn diagrams, multiple choice questionnaires, 

charts, columns of pros vs. cons, point systems, quotes, barometers of ‘going up/going down’ and so 

on, the approach is very much a systematic one. 

Complementing this is the book’s often left-field perspective. The words ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’ or 

‘probably’ do not feature; rather, this is about taking a view on the many and varied cultural reference 

points that constitute our everyday existence – each of which is treated with exactly the same degree 

of seriousness. 

By summarising only the most useful tips and information from books like How to Be a Domestic 

Goddess, He’s Just Not That Into You, The Shops, Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read 

Maps, Smart Women Get Rich, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and the Guinness 

Book of Records, magazines like Glamour, Vanity Fair, Good Housekeeping and The Economist, and 

websites like dailycandy.com and salon.com, EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK: A WOMAN'S 

GUIDE highlights the wisdom of generations of historians, scientists, cooks and couturiers to provide a 

fascinating insight into the psychology of women’s everyday life. 

Francesca Beauman gained a first-class honours degree in history from the University of 

Cambridge. Born in 1978, she works as a television presenter in the UK. Recent projects include 

presenting Bring It On, an entertainment show for BBC1, as well as Comic Relief (BBC1) and Oblivious 

(ITV). 

UK Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson 

Delivery May 2007 

UK Publication 


Agent CBC 


33

SHAPELY ANKLE PREFERRED 

A History of Lonely Hearts Ads 

Francesca Beauman 


Non-fiction 

Are you one of the millions of people every week who advertise for love either in newspapers, 

magazines or online? Think you’re the first? Well, think again. Because it turns out that people have 

been advertising for love for over three centuries. 

Cheapside, London, a warm Friday in July 1695. Nestled on page three of a weekly pamphlet called A 

Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, surrounded by ads for a cobbler’s apprentice, an 

Arabian stallion and a second-hand bed, was this brave plea: 

A Gentleman about 30 Years of Age, that says he had a Very Good Estate, would willingly Match 

himself to some Good Young Gentlewoman, that has a Fortune of 3000l. or thereabouts, and he will 

make Settlement to Content. 

This was the country’s first Lonely Heart ad. It was, however, only the beginning. SHAPELY ANKLE 

PREFERRED: a history of Lonely Hearts Ads traces the development of Lonely Hearts ads from the late 

seventeenth century right up until their ubiquitous presence in today’s media. Each chapter (‘Men 

Seeking Women’, ‘Men Seeking Women’, ‘Once Seen’ and so on) features some of the most hilarious, 

and the most heart-breaking, of the multitude of ads that have been placed by the lonely over the 

centuries. These are then used to provide a fascinating insight into the history of courtship, love and 

marriage. From consumerism to contraception, from the industrial revolution to gay rights, there is a 

Lonely Hearts ad to illuminate a great many of the transformations that British society has undergone 

over the past three hundred years. 

Francesca Beauman gained a first-class honours degree in history from the University of 

Cambridge. Born in 1978, she works as a television presenter in the UK. Recent projects include 

presenting Bring It On, an entertainment show for BBC1, as well as Comic Relief (BBC1) and Oblivious 

(ITV). 

UK Publisher Chatto & Windus 


UK Publication Winter 2008 


Agent CBC 


34


Non-fiction 

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BELLE DE JOUR 

Belle de Jour 

The follow-up to the bestseller THE INTIMATE ADVENTURES OF A LONDON CALL GIRL 

Whether she's describing peculiar fetishes or handing out agony aunt style advice, it's Belle's witty, stylish writing, 

rather than her salacious subject matter, that really stands out. Although more Bridget Jones in a brothel than 

Catherine Deneuve in Chanel, this tongue-in-cheek delight will nonetheless leave a smile on your face 

– HEAT 

Her writing [is] full of refreshing comedy and eye-watering advice...Belle's candid humour is compulsive 

– Katy Guest, INDEPENDENT 

full of frank humour and even more frank action 

– DAILY MIRROR 

Continuing on from the international success of THE INTIMATE ADVENTURES…, Belle de Jour returns 

with a new diary – and plenty of new adventures up her sleeve. 

Commenting on everything from how to get out of the sex industry to negotiating the shark-infested 

waters of straight jobs and single-partner sex, Belle records the changes in her life with the same wit, 

insight and personality that made her first book so notorious. 

Will she stay straight, or is the pull of being a former sex worker too strong? Is dating an ex-hooker 

too much for her long-suffering boyfriend? Is it ever the right time to tell family and friends exactly 

what she’s been up to since university? And if she comes clean, what on earth will the neighbours 

think? 

In this much anticipated companion volume, Belle deals with how to handle infidelity without being a 

hypocrite, how to gloss over the Grand Canyon gaps in her CV, and how to juggle the pressure of 

success with the desire for a normal life. From exotic holidays to family weddings, Belle records it all 

with a voice that is still as funny and frank as when she was turning tricks. 

Belle de Jour and her Internet diary came to widespread popular attention in the UK when she won 

the Guardian’s Best-Written Site Award. Her witty and frank observations of working in the sex trade 

and also of the common concerns of many young women living in the metropolis – dating, shopping, 

parents, partners, career – struck a chord with readers who flocked to the website. Even before the 

frantic media interest in the anonymous author’s identity, the site was registering around 20,000 hits 

every day. With the publication of THE INTIMATE ADVENTURES OF A LONDON CALL GIRL, her 

anecdotal memoirs of sex clients and family lunches, of bondage and home decorating, of perverts 

and boyfriends became a fully fledged book, and Belle de Jour the Bridget Jones for the post-Sex and 

the City generation. 


UK Publication 14 September 2006 


Agent PW 


35


Non-fiction 

THE PRINCE OF WALES (HIGHGATE) QUIZ BOOK 

Marcus Berkmann 

The Prince of Wales Pub in Highgate, north London, has held a weekly Tuesday night pub quiz for as 

long as anyone can remember. Its reputation precedes it: the quiz is widely acknowledged as one of 

the best in London, if not the country. 

Now the team who set the quizzes bring you the PRINCE OF WALES (HIGHGATE) QUIZ BOOK. Even if 

you're stumped by some of the questions, this book is as much about the answers, which will 

enlighten and astonish readers in equal measure. 

The exquisitely designed PRINCE OF WALES (HIGHGATE) QUIZ BOOK promises to do for pub quizzes 

what Ben Schott did for lists. 

Marcus Berkmann writes regularly for Private Eye, the Spectator and the Oldie. He has competed in 

the Prince of Wales (Highgate) pub quiz for longer than he cares to think about, and appeared on 

University Challenge in 2005 as part of the Private Eye team. 

UK Publisher Hodder & Stoughton 


Status Proofs 

Length Approximately 40 quizzes and 5,000 word introduction 

Agent PW 

All rights available excluding world English (Hodder & Stoughton) 

36


Non-fiction 

THE MAN WHO RAN THE MOON 

James E. Webb, Nasa and the Secret History of Project Apollo 

Piers Bizony 

Bizony's excellent corrective to Nasa's mythologised history takes an unflinching look… A firebrand of a book 

– PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY 

Most people would say that President John F. Kennedy championed America’s space agency Nasa, but 

this isn’t strictly correct. He didn’t care about space, and saw rocket exploration as little more than a 

Cold War contingency. It was a government administrator, James E. Webb, who steered the 

expansion of Nasa from a minor collection of research labs into one of the grandest enterprises the 

world had ever seen. 

If we had gone to the Moon Kennedy’s way, it would have been even more of a short-term adventure 

than it actually was. Nasa would not have survived as a major organization beyond the 1970s. It 

wouldn’t still be despatching robot probes to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It wouldn’t have built the 

Hubble Space Telescope that has so astonished the public imagination with its images of cosmic 

creation. And it wouldn’t be building the International Space Station, the most expensive civilian 

engineering project in world history. For all its recent travails, Nasa still commands influence today 

because a quick-thinking, fast-talking, smooth-operating man from North Carolina held all the cards 

throughout the 1960s. 

Webb knew how to persuade not one, but two presidents in succession to give him exactly what he 

wanted. Aided by a cadre of southern-born businessmen and politicians, he established a colossal 

network of influence in the service of space. THE MAN WHO RAN THE MOON is the first popular 

account of the man who ensured that America won the Space Race – and would keep on winning it, 

even today. Under Webb’s leadership, everything that we now take for granted about America’s preeminence 

in space was consolidated. No one in the past thirty-five years has achieved half as much 

for space exploration as did Webb. 

As much the story of the making of modern America as it is of a great innovator, THE MAN WHO RAN 

THE MOON is a remarkable tale that until now has been hidden from public view – the story of a 

powerful, combative, manipulative, driven man that encompasses Mafia influence, a ‘whistleblower’ 

suicide, an aptly named Mr Black facilitating many of the most questionable deals, and an exciting trail 

of big-money skulduggery… as well as an infamous launch-pad disaster. 

Piers Bizony has written about space exploration and cosmology for a wide variety of magazines in 

the UK and the US, including Focus, Omni, Wired and the Independent. He is the author of several 

acclaimed books including 2001: Filming the Future, about the making of Stanley Kubrick’s famous 

film; THE RIVERS OF MARS: Searching for the Cosmic Origins of Life; ISLAND IN THE SKY: Building 

the International Space Station; DIGITAL DOMAIN: The Leading Edge of Visual Effects; and 

STARMAN, produced as a book and a BBC film in partnership with the producer Jamie Doran, which 

told for the first time the real story of the life of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. 

UK Publisher Icon 

US Publisher Thunder’s Mouth 


US Publication 10 May 2006 


Agent PT 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US 

37

BONFIRE OF THE BRANDS 

Neil Boorman 


Non-fiction 

In this riveting memoir reminiscent of SUPER SIZE ME, the young journalist and fashion insider Neil 

Boorman will chart a very personal journey towards his date with destiny. What are brands? What do 

they say about our identity? Can we live without them? In an effort to understand the wider context 

of how brands have dominated every waking hour and led him to make a number of vital life choices, 

Boorman will embark on a programme of extensive research, experiment and analysis to come to 

grips with how brands influence our lives. When he finishes, he will burn every branded possession he 

owns, revealing how brands “brand”, the means by which they have become so powerful and why, 

like it or not, we are all “branded” individuals. BONFIRE OF THE BRANDS promises to be both a 

fascinating personal journey and a remarkable and timely social document. 

Whether Neil can live without brands, or indeed whether any of us, his audience, can begin to 

contemplate it, remains to be seen. But in the post No Logo world where Nike, to name but one, has 

seen its profits soar from 9.5 billion to 13.5 billion in the last five years, Bonfire Of The Brands 

promises to be both a fascinating personal journey and a remarkable and timely social document. 

Neil Boorman has forged a career as a style pundit, journalist, deejay, magazine publisher of 

publications such as Good For Nothing, Sleazenation and Shoreditch Twat, and most recently as a 

brand advisor. He currently writes a satirical film column for News International's London paper. 

UK Publisher Canongate 





Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, German (Ullstein), Italy (Guanda) and Netherlands 

(Meulenhoff). 

38


Non-fiction 

HOW TO SCORE 

Science and the Beautiful Game 

Ken Bray 

How exactly does Beckham bend it? Why don’t top strikers look precisely where they’re shooting? Is 

there a difference in the playing styles of international teams? What are the best tactics to use in a 

penalty shoot-out? Is position more important than anticipation when it comes to goalkeeping? Is 

heading harmful? And how far on average does a forward run during a game? 

HOW TO SCORE tackles these and many other intriguing questions – questions that over the past few 

years have become important topics in the burgeoning field of soccer science. Drawing on legendary 

events and matches across the globe and throughout the history of football, the book provides a fresh 

and timely perspective on the world’s most popular game, revealing many surprising facts and figures 

and debunking many cherished myths. 

Ken Bray has a longstanding passion for football and is an honorary researcher in the Sport and 

Exercise Biomechanics Group at the University of Bath. A pioneer of soccer science, he has published 

and lectured on such aspects as the aerodynamics of a spinning ball in a free kick and the tactics of 

the penalty shoot-out. During Euro 2004, his Guardian article about penalty shoot-outs that appeared 

on the eve of the England–Portugal game received tremendous public attention – but was completely 

ignored by England on the day… to their peril. 

UK Publisher Granta 

UK Publication 1 May 2006 


Agent PT 

All rights available excluding UK and Commonwealth, France (JC Lattes), Greece (Travlos), Italy (Sonzogno/RCS), 

Japan (NHK), Netherlands (De Bezige Bij), Serbia & Montenegro (Plato IK) 

39


Non-fiction 

THIRTEEN THINGS THAT DON’T MAKE SENSE 

A Journey through the Strangest Anomalies in Science 

Michael Brooks 

Ninety-six per cent of the universe is missing. The effects of homeopathy don't go away under 

rigorous scientific conditions. The speed of light isn't what it used to be. Thirty years on, no one has 

an explanation for a seemingly intelligent signal received from outer space. The US Department of 

Energy is re-examining cold fusion because the experimental evidence seems too solid to ignore. 

Doctors are admitting that the placebo effect is real – and extremely useful. 

In an age when science is supposed to be king, scientists are beset by experimental results they 

simply can't explain. But, if the past is anything to go by, these anomalies contain the seeds of future 

scientific revolutions. 

While taking readers on an entertaining tour of the strangest of scientific results, Michael Brooks 

argues in 13 THINGS THAT DON'T MAKE SENSE that the things we don't understand are the key to 

what we are about to discover. 

Michael Brooks has a PhD in quantum physics and is a senior features editor at New Scientist, which 

has more than three-quarters of a million readers worldwide. The book stems from a cover story he 

wrote for the magazine. The feature became the sixth most circulated story on the internet that year, 

and provoked enormous amounts of (often very complimentary) comments (Google '13 things that do 

not make sense' ). 

UK Publisher Profile 

US Publisher Broadway 

Delivery 1 July 2007 




Agent PT 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US & Canada, Brazil (Record), China (ANA Beijing), Germany 

(Ullstein), Italy (Longanesi), Japan (Soshisha) 

40


Non-fiction 

THE SCORPION'S SWEET VENOM 

Bruna Surfistinha 

Today, I can say that there's no fantasy that scares me because I've already done and seen everything. Some of 

them were pretty strange, I admit 

– Extract from THE SWEET VENOM OF THE SCORPION 

In 2001, aged just 17, and from a middle class Brazilian family, Rachel Pacheco ran away from home, 

and in desperation became a call girl. Working under the name of Bruna Surfinstinha from a brothel in 

Rio – the name means 'Bruna, the Surfer Chick' – she also began a web diary at 

www.brunasurfistinha.com which soon became Brazil's leading blog, averaging 15,000 hits a day and 

detailing her experiences with over 1,000 male and female clients. 

Three years later, and with the blog having received so much attention, Bruna decided to turn it into a 

book, and so was born THE SWEET VENOM OF THE SCORPION. With its candid mixture of sex advice 

for women – specifically so they can avoid their men becoming the clients of prostitutes – and stories 

of what her three years as a working girl entailed, the book rocketed into the Brazilian bestseller lists, 

going on to sell a quarter of a million copies. And at much the same time as this, Bruna was thankfully 

able to quit her working life to settle down with a 30 year-old businessman. She has quickly become 

one of Brazil's leading celebrities, appearing regularly on television and in Brazil's print media. 

Bruna Surfistinha is 21 years old and lives with her partner in Sao Paolo. 

UK Publisher Bloomsbury 

US Publisher Bloomsbury 

UK Publication 6 November 2006 


Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Bloomsbury), Australia and New Zealand (Macmillan), 

Estonia (Tammerraamat), France (Michel Lafon), Germany (Ullstein paperback), Italy (RCS), Netherlands 

(Uniboek), Latin American Portuguese (Panda), European Spanish (Ediciones Maeva), Latin American Spanish 

(Planeta Argentina), Turkey (Tramvay), Vietnam (Vinabook) 

41


Non-fiction 

LOST LIBRARIES OF THE RENAISSANCE 

Alex Butterworth 

In the spring of 1417, the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini could no longer bear the stifling 

atmosphere of the Council of Constance, as it struggled to decide between the competing claimants to 

the title of Pope. Packing his bags, he set out to explore the nearby Alpine monasteries for lost Latin 

manuscripts. Poggio’s discovery of an unknown book by Quintilian in the library of St Gall was the first 

of his many in the decades to come. The combined impact of Poggio, his friends and his rivals would 

change European civilization in the most profound ways. 

THE LOST LIBRARIES OF THE RENAISSANCE is the story of the tireless fifteenth-century book hunters 

who scoured Europe, the Middle East and far beyond for forgotten works of ancient wisdom, and of 

the princes, popes and sultans who funded their expeditions and competed to 

recreate the greatest libraries of the past. It is also the history of the world of ruins, superstition and 

violent vendettas, and how it was changed for ever by the discoveries of the book hunters and the 

intellectual daring of those who interpreted their finds. 

Quarrelsome, seditious and libidinous, the letters and memoirs of these men are filled with passion 

and bawdy humour. There is the infamous forger Annio of Viterbo; Niccolo Niccoli, who mortgaged his 

life to continue collecting rare books; Ciriac of Ancona, who drew on the classics to offer image 

consultancy to Mehmet II; and Flavio Biondi who was the first to excavate the remains of ancient 

Rome. Poggio himself even found time to compile the world’s first book of jokes. 

Famous in their own day for their political and cultural influence, there is rarely a dull moment in the 

company of the early humanists. This book revives their reputations and re-examines their 

achievements: in doing so, it recounts a history of the Renaissance that is unlike any other. 

Alex Butterworth is a writer, dramatist and broadcaster. The joint author of POMPEII: The Living 

City (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005) and the author of the British Film Institute’s NEW SCREEN MEDIA, 

he is a frequent contributor to publications including the Observer, History Today and BBC History. He 

holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the Royal College of Art, studied screenwriting at the 

National Film School, and is currently an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham. He 

is married with two children and lives in North London. 

UK Publisher Cape/Random House 

Delivery April 2008 




Agent PW 


42

THE WORLD THAT NEVER WAS 

Alex Butterworth 


Non-fiction 

The last years of the nineteenth century saw international terrorism make its first, furious appearance. 

Anarchist cells carried out a wave bombings and assassinations across Europe and in America – or so, 

at least, the governments of France, Britain and especially Russia liked their populations to believe. 

The truth, however, was far murkier. Infiltration and surveillance comprised one part of the armoury 

of the security services, but equally important was the use of agents provocateurs and black 

propaganda. Under Pyotr Rachkovsky, head of the Paris station of the Tsar’s overseas intelligence 

agency, the policing methods of Russian despotism spread to the West and the line between 

incitement and prevention became blurred. Only now is it possible to gauge the dangerous depths of 

their deceptions, and the terrible extent of their impact on the history of the twentieth century. 

During the fin de siècle, the popular imagination was filled with fantasies of militant Anarchism: of 

airborne attack and viral plagues. THE MAP OF UTOPIA examines the human stories that lie behind 

this hysteria. Taking the form of a group biography of eight key figures in the radical movement – two 

Russian, two British, two French, a German and an Italian – it tells the story of their interweaving lives 

during the period between the collapse of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the failed Russian 

Revolution of 1905. Epic in scope, the book traces its protagonists’ movements from the furthest 

reaches of Siberia to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York; from the wastes of a New 

Caledonian penal colony to the watchmaker communities of Switzerland. And, all along, the agents of 

the police are in their midst, trying to manipulate events to their own ends. 

THE MAP OF UTOPIA will pose the question of whether secret servants of the state who abandon the 

principles of the society they serve improve the security of their populations or exacerbate the danger. 

It will consider how the oppressed are radicalized, how violence begets violence and whether a 

tolerant, open and just society is its own best defence against terrorism. 

Alex Butterworth is a writer, dramatist and broadcaster. The joint author of POMPEII: The Living 

City (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005) and the author of the British Film Institute’s NEW SCREEN MEDIA, 

he is a frequent contributor to publications including the Observer, History Today and BBC History. He 

holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the Royal College of Art, studied screenwriting at the 

National Film School, and is currently an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham. He 

is married with two children and lives in North London. 


Delivery February 2007 

UK Publication May 2008 



Agent PW 


43

LIKE BROTHERS 

Men & Friendship 

Michael Bywater 

Praise for Michael Bywater 


Non-fiction 

Bywater’s book LOST WORLDS is the best thing about — better than iPods, the first rime of winter, salty 

porridge, Paula Rego, chocolate bars dusted with cinnamon and the Dandy annual... [he] writes so well it makes 

you want to cut your throat with a butter-knife, and yet so enticingly that you keep putting off the fatal act until 

you’ve finished the page, and the next one too... 

– Andrew Marr, DAILY TELEGRAPH 

A magnificent companion... playful, gruff, intemperate, eloquent... exuberantly spilling over into footnotes, 

parentheses and jokes... It’s where stand-up comedy meets sit-down thought... Bywater proves himself to be a 

member of an exclusive, intellectually reckless and restless club that would also include Jorge Luis Borges, 

Laurence Sterne and E.L.Wisty 

– David Flusfeder, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 

Four years after his best friend of twenty years, Douglas Adams, had died, Michael Bywater tried for 

the last time to call him. The questions that this event raised form the central theme to LIKE 

BROTHERS, which will interweave with the crucial friendships of Michael's life – such as his friendship 

with Douglas – the story of men and their friendships in general: how we feel about them, how they 

work, how ideas of friendship have changed over time and between cultures and how it is that, now, 

friendships between men go almost unspoken-of, even though they are often among the most 

nourishing and long-lasting relationships of their lives, weathering storms which can destroy marriages 

and wreck lives. 

Like love affairs, male friendships seem to those involved to be unique, yet, to the onlooker, most if 

not all are fundamentally the same. From the voluble, tactile, demonstrative friendships between 

Greek men, to the terribly English friendship which has been described as “beginning with a careful 

avoidance of personal confidences, and ending in complete silence”; from the religious ceremonies of 

mediaeval sworn-brotherhood and the Greek Orthodox adelphopoiesis which persists even today, to 

the waspish but inseparable academic brothers-in-arms at an Oxbridge High Table; from the pairs of 

spiffily-dressed youths leaning on their motorcycles in the back streets of Rome to the elderly Arabs 

strolling hand-in-hand through the suq of Manama, and taking in the two nonagenarian Jewish 

gentlemen playing chess in a shirt-pocket-sized square of dusty Manhattan “park”, and the pair of 

poplin-suited lawyers drinking tall skinny corporaccinos (hold the Sweet-’n’-Lo) in Beverly Hills... all of 

these friendships have far more in common than they have differences. 

Michael Bywater is the acclaimed author of LOST WORLDS (2004), and BIG BABIES (2006), both 

published by Granta. Aside from his career as a writer and broadcaster – including spending ten years 

on the staff of Punch, and being the long-running columnist for the Independent on Sunday and 

cultural critic for the New Statesman – he also teaches the tragedy paper at Cambridge, and in 2006 

has been writer-in-residence at Magdalen College. Michael lives in Gloucestershire and has one 

daughter. He is a certified pilot and plays the harpsichord. 


Delivery March 2008 

UK Publication 


Length 100,000-110,000 words 

Agent PW 

World rights (Granta) 

For all rights enquiries please contact David Graham: dgraham@granta.com 

44


Non-fiction 

ABOUT THE SIZE OF IT 

A Serious Book About Weights and Measures 

Warwick Cairns 

Fun and fascinating – the secrets and tricks of how we measure the world around us 

– Conn Iggulden, author of THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS 

On the face of it, this book is about a subject that the author would be the first to admit is about as 

dull a subject as they come – duller, even, than punctuation, and duller by far than lists of random 

facts. But it takes a very particular and unusual approach to its subject, and never fails to provoke 

heated debate. 

THE COMMON MEASURE is – to cut to the quick – a serious (and seriously funny) book about weights 

and measures. It explains what they are, how they come about and how they are formed and shaped 

by the one guiding principle of measurement that no one ever mentions: that most of us have better 

things to think about, and better things to carry around with us, than rulers, balances and measuringjugs. 

So if you’ve ever wanted to know how to convert an ordinary Wellington boot into a precision 

measuring-instrument for use in the building trade, or if you’ve ever found yourself faced with the 

task of estimating the weight of a pile of loose apples but are too mean to buy yourself a set of 

scales, then the one thing you need to get (apart from a life, obviously) is this book. In fact it is the 

only compendium devoted to the mishmash of bodges, estimates and rules-of-thumb that makes up 

the ‘system’ of measurement used by the average person in the street, and the only book to explain 

why this system is not naturally meant to be metric. 

What’s more, the book will attract the written endorsement of an absolutely stellar list of names, 

which includes – but is not limited to – many of Britain’s biggest-selling authors. Examples include Jilly 

Cooper, Ranulph Fiennes, Edward Fox, Dick Francis, Peter Hitchens, Jools Holland, Alexander McCall 

Smith, Richard Mabey, Andrew Roberts, J.K. Rowling and Anthony Worrall Thompson. What unites 

these disparate names is that they are all members of an organization concerned with weights and 

measures, and all of them subscribe, broadly, to the philosophy behind this little book. The 

organization in fact commissioned the author to conduct a series of opinion polls about people’s 

attitudes to the metric system – and it was this research that got him thinking about the subject from 

first principles and spurred him to write the book. 

Warwick Cairns studied English and psychology at Keele, and then English at Yale under Professor 

Harold Bloom. Apart from a bit of travelling, he has spent most of the years since working in 

advertising and is now head of planning and strategy at a small brand consultancy. Throughout his 

career he has commissioned research into the way people think and act, and concentrated on big but 

unfashionable groups that don’t tend to get looked at by other researchers. His travelling included a 

stint drilling wells on a Sioux reservation in Dakota with Operation Raleigh, and a trip to Africa with 

the explorer Wilfred Thesiger. He lives in Windsor with his wife and two daughters. He has been 

commissioning research for the British Weights & Measures Association since 1997, and acted as an 

expert witness in several trials of traders charged with defying the compulsory metrication laws. 

UK Publisher Macmillan 

UK Publication Autumn 2007 



Agent PT 

All rights available excluding world English (Macmillan) 

45

CROWDED MIND 

Rita Carter 


Non-fiction 

A groundbreaking book that redefines the nature of personality 

Why should there be just one ‘self’ per body? Recent advances in neuroscience have demonstrated 

that a ‘self’ is only a construct of the human brain – a closely woven idea. So why should a brain not 

weave two selves – or more? This is precisely what seems to happen in people with multiple 

personality disorder. In this bizarre condition, a single person has several entirely different characters, 

some of whom seem to be unaware of the existence of the others. 

THE CROWDED MIND is not about these extreme cases of ‘split personality’, however. It is about 

normal people – and the many characters who inhabit them. The book presents an entirely new way 

of looking at our selves. Its central thesis is that every person is a ‘collective’ of personalities, each 

one of which can be identified as a ‘self’. Findings in the burgeoning area of ‘psychoneurology’ show 

how the brain tricks us into thinking this collective is a single entity. The only difference between 

people with multiple personality disorder and others is that in the latter the different selves share a 

common memory, and so believe they are part of a single entity. 

As with all tight-knit groups, the various selves within each of us sometimes co-exist in perfect 

harmony, and sometimes clash – which explains why people often report that they feel they are 

‘falling apart’ or ‘acting out of character’. In presenting this novel scientific view of personality, the 

acclaimed science writer Rita Carter shows us how we can recognize these inner characters and 

weave them together for the benefit of all. THE CROWDED MIND is rooted in mainstream brain 

science but written in a way that makes it comprehensible and relevant to everyone: one of those rare 

works that says something new and important about who and what we are. 

Rita Carter is an award-winning science and medical writer. She contributes to a wide range of 

newspapers and magazines, including the New Scientist, The Times, Independent and Daily Mail. 

Before specializing in science she worked for six years as a television news presenter (Thames 

Television) and radio host and producer. She continues to appear and be heard regularly on television 

and radio as a medical and science commentator, and gives frequent talks and lectures throughout 

Europe and the US. She has written two books about the workings of the human mind, MAPPING THE 

MIND (1998) and CONSCIOUSNESS (2002), both published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and 

the University of California Press in the US. MAPPING THE MIND has sold in 18 territories and 11 

languages and is still selling strongly. 

UK Publisher Little, Brown 

US Publisher Little, Brown 





Agent PT 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Editora Rocco), Italy (Ponte Alle Grazie), Japan 

(Random House Kodansha), Korea (Gyoyangin), Poland (Amber) 

46


Non-fiction 

THE SUN KINGS 

The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of 

How Modern Astronomy Began 

Stuart Clark 

I found myself captivated by the characters, the colossal problems they tackled, and the stunning conclusions 

they finally reached. I commend Clark for combining so many interesting ideas into a single, fast-paced, 

beautifully crafted story 

– Dava Sobel, author of LONGITUDE 

Undoubtedly the most gripping and brilliant popular science history account that I have ever read. It is 

informative, accurate, and relevant. The author’s ability to write so vividly makes me seethe with jealousy 

– Owen Gingerich, Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science, Harvard University, and author of THE 

BOOK THAT NOBODY READ 

In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a bloodred 

aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph 

systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. 

Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first 

time, human beings began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. 

But nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth – nobody, that is, 

except the English amateur astronomer Richard Carrington. 

In this riveting account, Stuart Clark tells for the first time the full story behind Carrington’s 

observations of a mysterious explosion on the surface of the Sun and how his brilliant insight – that 

the Sun’s magnetism directly influences the Earth – helped to usher in the modern era of astronomy. 

Clark vividly brings to life the scientists who roundly rejected the significance of Carrington’s discovery 

of solar flares, as well as those who took up his struggle to prove the notion that the Earth could be 

touched by influences from space. Clark also reveals new details about the sordid scandal that 

destroyed Carrington’s reputation and led him from the highest echelons of science to the very lowest 

reaches of love, villainy and revenge. 

THE SUN KINGS transports us back to Victorian England, into the very heart of the great nineteenthcentury 

scientific controversy about the Sun’s hidden influence over our planet. 

Stuart Clark is the former editor of the UK’s bestselling astronomy magazine, Astronomy Now. He 

has a PhD in astrophysics and until 2001 was director of public astronomy education at the University 

of Hertfordshire. In 2001 the Independent placed him alongside Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin 

Rees, the Astronomer Royal, as one of the ‘stars’ of British astrophysics teaching. The author of 

several overviews of modern astronomy, including one successful children’s book, Stuart currently 

writes for the European Space Agency and is a regular contributor to such magazines as New Scientist 

and BBC Focus. He is the author of several books, including JOURNEY TO THE STARS and UNIVERSE 

IN FOCUS: The Story of the Hubble Telescope. 

US Publisher Princeton University Press 

US Publication May-07 

US Publication May 2007 

Status Proofs 


Agent PT 

All rights available excluding world English (Princeton University Press), Italy (Giulio Einaudi) 

47


Non-fiction 

THE EGG AND SPERM RACE 

The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the 

Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth 

Matthew Cobb 

A fascinating subject, full of arresting material and personalities 

– Lisa Jardine, SUNDAY TIMES 

Lively… You can almost smell the formaldehyde on the page 

– FINANCIAL TIMES 

For millennia, humanity has wondered where life comes from. At different times and in different 

places, people have discussed what the mother and father each contribute, how the miracle of 

conception takes place, and why offspring sometimes look like one parent, sometimes like another 

and sometimes like neither. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, this combination of 

reproduction, conception and embryonic development was wrapped up in a single term: ‘generation’. 

Amazingly, the decisive step in understanding generation, in revealing how sex works and in outlining 

the fundamental laws of reproduction came about in the space of ten tumultuous years in the middle 

of the seventeenth century. This was when a network of six scientists and physicians – including 

names famous in the history of science such as de Graaf, Swammerdam, Redi, Malpighi and 

Leeuwenhoek – turned their scalpels and their microscopes, their intuition and their experimental 

ingenuity, on what had become the crucial problem of the age. Now, for the first time, THE EGG AND 

SPERM RACE tells their story. 

Linked by a series of friendships, rivalries and chance encounters, these six men were radically 

different in temperament and training: they include a poet keen on vipers, a shop-keeper with an 

unhealthy interest in his own sperm, a mystical student obsessed with insects, a bright young doctor 

loved by his friends and hated by his rivals, and a future saint who laid the foundations of neurology, 

geology and crystallography. Through the insights produced by their various approaches, they 

changed the way we understand the living world. Above all, they showed that humans are just like 

other animals, subject to the same laws of reproduction and development. 

Matthew Cobb is programme director for zoology at the University of Manchester, where he lectures 

on animal behaviour. Over the past few years he has also made an intensive study of the life of 

Swammerdam, one of the main protagonists in THE EGG AND SPERM RACE. Matthew has thus 

become an acknowledged expert on the scientific participants and debates of the seventeenth 

century, and has published several articles on the topic for both general readers and historians of 

science. He is also a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. 

UK Publisher Simon & Schuster 

US Publisher 8 August 2006 

UK Publication 3 April 2006 


Agent PT 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Netherlands (De Bezige Bij) 

48

SATAN'S CIRCUS 

Mike Dash 


Non-fiction 

Nearly five million men and women have served the United States of America as police officers. Only 

one has been executed for murder. 

In 1912, Charley Becker was the most admired policeman in New York, cleaning up an area of 

Manhattan famed for the gambling, whoring and drinking that went on after dark. Everyone called it 

the Tenderloin: the most glamorous, notorious square mile on Earth. 

Then, on 16 July 1912, a gambler named Herman Rosenthal was shot dead. For the police it was the 

result of a gamblers’ dispute. But New York’s District Attorney thought differently, and Becker himself 

was charged with ordering the murder. 

His arrest transformed the Rosenthal affair into the most sensational murder case New York had seen. 

It emerged that Becker had led a double life. In theory, he was the pillar of the law. In practice, he 

had been thoroughly corrupt. By the time the case came to court, New York newspaper readers knew 

all about Charley Becker – and the corruption that riddled New York City. 

They also knew that Rosenthal was shot because he was going to talk. What they didn’t know, and 

the jury never heard, was that he had been killed by his fellow gamblers, terrified that Rosenthal 

would ruin them. Becker was a fall-guy, a man so corrupt no one would ever believe him. 

This is the story of ‘the crookedest cop who ever stood behind a 'shield’ – and of the raucous, gaudy, 

utterly corrupt city that made him. 

Mike Dash is a Cambridge-educated historian in his late 30s, and is the author of three previous 

books, THUG, TULIPOMANIA and BATAVIA’S GRAVEYARD, which have been published to acclaim 

around the world. Also a magazine editor and journalist, he contributes regularly to newspapers and 

magazines ranging a spectrum from The Times and the Telegraph to Time Out and Maxim. 


US Publisher Crown/Random House 

UK Publication August 2007 



Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Random House), Netherlands (Uitgeverij de 

Arbeiderspers) 

49

OUT OF HOLLYWOOD 

Tom Dewe Matthews 


Non-fiction 

OUT OF HOLLYWOOD answers the question that nobody has posed until now: what happened to the 

Hollywood exiles when they fled from the House of un-American Activities Committee blacklist of 

Hollywood professionals during the 1950s’ communist witch hunt in America? 

Exile was forced upon the Hollywood exiles by their political prosecutors – over 80 per cent of the 

Hollywood witnesses refused to respond to the committee’s questions and many of the dissenters 

went into exile. Others avoided the US marshals bearing subpoenas to appear in front of the HUAC, 

hid out, went on the run and then fled from America. 

This is a book about political dissent as much as is it also about the exiles’ individual journeys: from 

the heights of Hollywood lifestyles to a hilltop village in the Scottish Highlands, a marble palace in 

Cuernavaca, a derelict farmer’s cottage in Kent or the salons in the fashionable quarters of Paris, 

London, Madrid and Mexico City. It also considers the reaction of the countries in which the exiles 

settled to the movie professionals suddenly among them. 

Above all, though, this is a book about heroes, because the Hollywood exiles gave up so much – their 

family and friends, their careers and country – all for the sake of a personal belief, a universal ideal: 

freedom of speech. Glamorous risk-takers who led extraordinarily adventurous lives, the Hollywood 

exiles took part in momentous historical events and lived the real-life adventure story of movie men 

and women in exile. 

Tom Dewe Matthews is a freelance journalist who writes for The Times, Guardian, Independent 

and Evening Standard, among other newspapers. 






Agent CBC 


50


Non-fiction 

BODY SHOPPING 

Business, Bioethics and Human Tissue 

Donna Dickenson 

Donna Dickenson's work is characterized by commitment and openness. It encompasses philosophy, law, health 

care ethics, global politics, feminism, history, poetry, literature, and timely new areas in bioethics, such as stem 

cell research... Time and again, Dickenson strives to express the unique diversity of human values while 

respecting the concept of universality 

– International Spinoza Lens Award 2006 Committee 

From the sale of the late broadcaster Alastair Cooke’s bones, through the targeting of pregnant 

women by for-profit umbilical cord blood banks, to the collection of human eggs from US college 

students, BODY SHOPPING is the first full exposé of the burgeoning international trade in human body 

parts. 

With modern developments in medicine and biotechnology, our body parts – cells, tissues, organs – 

have increased in value both as a source of information and as the raw material for new commercial 

products. Everyone from researchers and entrepreneurs to insurers, employers and governments have 

uses for our biological materials and genetic information – and have more access to them than most 

of us know. What does this mean for the trust patients have traditionally placed in their doctors, for 

the motives and goals of medical research, for personal privacy, for our very sense of identity? Can a 

human being be reduced to the sum of his or her body parts? 

In BODY SHOPPING, Donna Dickenson makes a case against the newfound rights of businesses to 

harvest our bodies and gain exclusive profit from the resulting products and processes. At a time 

when the tissues and genes – the essence of each person’s individual humanity – are becoming, in 

the words of the head of one pharmaceutical company, ‘the currency of the future’, we are, she 

argues, no longer even considered owners of our own flesh and bone. To illustrate her case, she 

presents a series of compelling stories of individuals injured or abused by the increasingly rapacious 

biotechnology industry, so providing a fresh take on the evolving legal position, the international 

dimension, the historical long view and the latest biomedical research – an approach that goes beyond 

a mere recital of horror stories to suggest a range of new strategies to bring the biotechnology 

industry to heel. 

Donna Dickenson is Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. 

She was recently awarded the prestigious Spinoza Lens award for her contributions to global ethics. In 

some twenty books and sixty articles, she has explored such weighty bioethical issues as death and 

dying, face and hand transplants, reproductive rights and the use of women’s tissues in stem-cell 

research. She has given expert evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology 

Committee and as a member of the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Ethics Committee, is 

a regular contributor to radio and television, and is frequently invited to lecture in the UK and abroad. 

Her books range across not only medical ethics, but also literature. BODY SHOPPING is her first 

popular book on science and medicine. 

UK Publisher Oneworld 

Delivery 30 June 2007 




Agent PT 

All rights available excluding world English (Oneworld) 

51

DRIVING OVER BRATWURST 

Ben Donald 


Non-fiction 

In the twenty-first century, Germany still labours under so many prejudices that it is the last place 

many English people would consider going on holiday. Yet the country is vast, beautiful and largely 

unknown outside its commercial centres. And the Germans themselves are funnier, more disorganized 

and more passionate than most people believe. Aside from the Rough Guide, a few city guides and 

dense cultural histories there is nothing on Germany in our travel sections, and certainly nothing lighthearted 

and idyllic. In summer 2006 Germany will host the football World Cup and for a month the 

world’s eyes will be on the country. What better time, then, and how much more zeitgeist could it be, 

to write a book giving a humorous but ultimately positive face-lift for this nation at the heart of 

Europe? AToujours Deutschland which would lie midway in the market between Peter Mayle and Alain 

de Botton…? 

Ben Donald lives with his wife and child in West London and is in charge of television and book 

rights at BBC Worldwide. His earlier life is more relevant, however, for he moved to Germany at the 

age of three. Ben went on to study German and German literature, among other languages, at school 

and university in England, and claims that it was at Cambridge that his youthful idealism found a 

mirror in the writings of the great German thinkers. Fluent in German, French and Italian, he also 

succumbed during his student days to an irrepressible wanderlust which, in turn, led him to write 

occasional travel pieces for The Times as well as three guidebooks (BOLOGNA, Footprint, 2002; 

TURIN, Footprint, 2004; MILAN, Cadogan) and also to co-author with Phil Dodd THE BOOK OF CITIES 

(Pavilion, 2004). 





Length 90,000-100,000 words 

Agent PW 


52

EXTREME PERSUASION 

Kevin Dutton 


Non-fiction 

An argument in a bar turns nasty and a man waves a broken bottle in the face of his assailant; an 

armed robber slips a piece of paper across the counter to a bank-clerk, informing her he’s got a gun; 

a terrorist cell hijacks a commercial airliner and suddenly diverts it from its flight-path; a drunken 

passenger begins hurling abuse on a crowded train; a motorist pulls over and makes his way furiously 

towards the car of another driver who has cut him up: in such flashpoint manifestations of conflict, 

when anger rages, anxiety runs riot and feelings of hopelessness encroach and overwhelm, extreme 

persuaders can assassinate knife-edge confrontations with telescopic precision. They behave in a way 

fundamentally different from the rest of us. They can think without thinking, make instant decisions 

seemingly without having to decide, and finesse dramatic turnarounds under extreme conditions, 

effectively and quickly. 

In EXTREME PERSUASION, the brilliant young psychologist Kevin Dutton provides a guide to this, the 

ultimate frontier in conflict resolution. He investigates the origins of conflict in human history and 

explains how our in-built capacity to resolve it arose from complex neural systems that have evolved 

to enable us to survive; draws on personal testimonies and first-hand reports to piece together the 

psychological profile of the extreme persuader; explores what happens in the brains of the people 

whose thoughts and actions are being manipulated; and compares and contrasts the skills of extreme 

persuaders with those of psychopaths, the ultimate psychological manipulators whose characteristic 

attributes – including their intense gaze, charm and feigned humility – fly in the face of their lack of 

ability to empathize. Along the way we meet the professionals trained in the techniques of extreme 

persuasion (hostage negotiators, special-forces soldiers, high-finance trouble-shooters and lawyers) as 

well as the ‘naturals' (politicians and spiritual leaders, as well as psychopaths). 

EXTREME PERSUASION is the first popular and practical book to concentrate on persuasion squarely 

in the context of conflict resolution. Its watchword is humility rather than hubris. The book has wide 

implications for our day-to-day relationships with friends, family and colleagues, as well as for society 

as a whole. It presents new findings about the human brain and behaviour that may provide the key 

to understanding, and even changing, how we view ourselves and how we behave towards others. 

Kevin Dutton is a lecturer in psychology and senior research fellow at St Edmund's College, 

University of Cambridge. He has a first-class honours degree in psychology from the University of Kent 

and a doctorate in psychology from the University of Essex. In addition to his research on conflict 

resolution, he is the executive secretary of the International Society for Science and Religion (based at 

the University of Cambridge). He has organized and spoken at meetings and conferences across the 

world, and his work has been published in leading international scientific journals including Journal of 

Experimental Psychology and Cognition and Emotion. 

UK Publisher Heinemann 

US Publisher Harcourt 

Delivery 1 January 2007 


US Publication Autumn 2007 



Agent PT 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Israel (Kinneret), Italy (Einaudi), Japan (Japan Broadcast 

Publishing) 

53

THE MAN'S BOOK 

Thomas Fink 


Non-fiction 

Perhaps you’ve wondered about which urinal you should choose (and of course why), or the 119 

single malt whiskies and how they differ, or even Poker probabilities, conker strategies and darts 

statistics… Well, it’s all in THE MAN’S BOOK, which unabashedly celebrates being male and 

comprehensively examines the essential elements of a man’s life. It’s a chap’s companion if you like; 

a bloke’s bible that belongs in every man’s back pocket. 

The Man’s Book also clarifies matters of etiquette, from suggesting the politest way of banning 

smokers (or non-smokers) from your house, to explaining why you should never use your mobile 

phone while waiting for a date to arrive. The essential elements of a man’s life are all explained in a 

systematic and intelligent way, with facts and figures, diagrams, tables and formulas to help men out 

of any tight spot. 

Thomas Fink was a Junior Fellow at Caius College, Cambridge. He is now a theoretical physicist at 

Institut Curie and lives in Mayfair. He is co-author of THE 85 WAYS TO TIE A TIE, published by Fourth 

Estate. 


UK Publication 14 September 2006 


Agent PW 


54


Non-fiction 

WHEN I AM PLAYING WITH MY CAT, HOW DO I KNOW THAT 

SHE IS NOT PLAYING WITH ME? 

Saul Frampton 

WHEN I AM PLAYING WITH MY CAT will use the last twenty or so years of Michel de Montaigne's life 

in 16th Century France to show how this most modern of philosophers – modern in terms of the 

extraordinarily contemporary feel of his writing – moved from feeling that he walked in the shadow of 

death to embracing life again in all its messy, exuberant variety. The story really starts with that 

terrible moment when, aged 38, Michel de Montaigne suffered the deaths of five of his six children – 

and of his brother, and of his best friend – in quick succession, and withdrew to the tower of his 

chateau outside Bordeaux to write and prepare himself for his own death. 

There, in his circular study, surrounded by 1,000 books and working beneath beams which he had 

carved with quotations from his favourite classical philosophers, Montaigne began to write essays 

which initially mirrored the concerns of his 16th century noble Gascon background: essays on warfare, 

for instance, or on sieges and on battle tactics. But gradually Montaigne began to make himself his 

own material, interweaving his thoughts on the importance of friendship and his own personal failings, 

say, with his explorations of the rights of animals and the puzzling behaviour of foreigners. And what 

emerges over the 20-year span of his writing is a portrait of a man falling back in love with life, so 

much so that he begins to score out some of the more Stoic quotations carved above his head. 

Saul Frampton graduated with a first class degree in Philosophy and English, and wrote a doctorate 

on Renaissance literature at Wadham College, Oxford. Since then, he has been a fellow at Oxford 

University, an assistant editor at the London Review of Books and now teaches at the University of 

Westminster. He is 38. 

UK Publisher Faber & Faber 

US Publisher Pantheon/Vintage 





Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Pantheon/Vintage), Italy (Guanda), Netherlands 

(Ambo/Anthos), Sweden (Brombergs Bokforlag) 

For French rights please contact Paul Keegan at Faber & Faber: paul.keegan@faber.co.uk 

55


Non-fiction 

FLAT EARTH 

The Extraordinary History and Modern Revival of an Ancient 

Idea 

Christine Garwood 

Contrary to popular belief, fostered in countless school classrooms the world over, Christopher 

Columbus did not discover that the world was round. The idea of the world as a sphere had been 

widely accepted in scientific, philosophical and even religious circles from as early as the fourth 

century BC. Bizarrely, it was not until the supposedly more rational nineteenth century that the notion 

that the world might actually be flat really took hold. Even more bizarrely, it persists to this day, 

despite Apollo missions and widely publicized pictures of the decidedly spherical earth from space. 

Based on a range of original sources, Christine Garwood’s history of flat-earth beliefs – from the 

Babylonians to the present day – raises issues central to the history and philosophy of science, its 

relationship with religion and the making of human knowledge about the natural world. FLAT EARTH 

is the first definitive study of one of history's most notorious and persistent ideas, and evokes all the 

intellectual, philosophical and spiritual turmoil of the modern age. Ranging from ancient Greece, 

through Victorian England, to modern-day America, this is a story that encompasses religion, science 

and pseudo-science as well as a spectacular array of people and places. Where else could eccentric 

aristocrats, fundamentalist preachers and conspiracy theorists appear alongside Copernicus, Newton 

and Nasa, except in an account of such a legendary misconception? 

Christine Garwood has a BA in history and a PhD in the history of science. She was formerly a 

research fellow at the Open University, where she was principal archivist on the Wallace Project. A 

part-time lecturer at University College Northampton (University of Leicester), she is the author of 

several articles on Alfred Russel Wallace and on Victorian and Edwardian science and society more 

generally. 





Agent PT 


56

THE EXTRA MAN 

John Geiger 


Non-fiction 

THE EXTRA MAN is a biography of an extraordinary idea: that, despite cruel hardships, something 

wonderful is happening to people who experience life at its most extreme. 

For scores of explorers, mountaineers, prisoners of war, sailors and astronauts have survived great 

stress and danger to life, only to reveal that an unseen companion guided them through the worst of 

their ordeal. Witnesses range a spectrum from Sir Ernest Shackleton and Charles Lindbergh, polar 

explorers Robert Swan and Ann Bancroft, climbers Hermann Buhl and Doug Scott, to US astronaut 

Jerry Linenger. 

As the legendary Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who experienced the phenomenon on both 

Nanga Parbat and Everest, put it: ‘It is leading you out of the impossible’. Among the many people 

living today who can attest to the force is 9/11 survivor Ron DiFrancesco, who was guided through a 

smoke and fire-filled stairwell in the South Tower of the World Trade Center moments before it 

collapsed. A gripping and commercial exploration of this extraordinary syndrome, setting out all the 

various explanations, THE EXTRA MAN also is, first and foremost, a stirring inventory of the most 

remarkable survival stories ever told. 

John Geiger is the review editor of the National Post in Canada and an exploration expert who 

somehow makes time to spend his summers retracing the progress of various nineteenth-century 

expeditions across Greenland and the Arctic. 

Canadian Publisher Penguin Canada 

Delivery February 2007 

Canadian Publication August 2007 


Agent PW 

All rights available excluding Canada 

57


Non-fiction 

MCMAFIA 

Globalization and the Rise of Organized Crime 

Misha Glenny 

MCMAFIA is the first book to chart the course of the globalizing mafia through the vivid stories of 

individual mafiosi, their victims, their clients and their foot soldiers. It provides first-hand reports from 

the main centres of the new mafia – Russia, the Balkans, China, South-East Asia, West Africa, Israel, 

Dubai, Colombia, Mexico and Canada (yes, Canada) – to explain its rise over the past 15 years; its 

peculiar relationship with the West (one of mutual dependence as well as hostility); its strict 

adherence to liberal principles of supply and demand; its magnetic attraction to terrorism; how it is 

being combated by policing methods; and how major new thinking in foreign policy may prove the 

most effective antidote of all. 

The book demonstrates the connection between the massive rise in organized crime over the past two 

decades and both the deregulation of the global financial system and the collapse of the Soviet 

Empire. It examines the relationship between the system of global trade and organized crime as well 

as the links between the arms trade, crime and terror. And it argues that organized crime can only be 

successfully combated if it is regarded as an economic force that feeds off the poverty of the 

developing world and exploits the prohibition of commodities and services in the West. 

By following people or goods as they travel as victims, couriers, gangsters or police, ascertaining their 

motives, detailing their experiences and reliving their dramas, Misha Glenny blends colourful and 

dramatic individual stories into the broader picture of how crime in the underdeveloped world seeps 

into the Western world. In doing so, he sheds light both on the human dimension and on the guiding 

principles of an extraordinary global phenomenon. 

Misha Glenny is the author of THE REBIRTH OF HISTORY, THE RISE AND FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA 

and A HISTORY OF THE BALKANS. An acclaimed journalist and historian, he contributes regularly to 

the Guardian, Observer, The New York Times and New York Review of Books as well as specialist 

journals and books dealing with south-eastern Europe. A regular broadcaster on radio and television, 

he has most recently advised several southern European countries on policymaking and legislation 

(sponsored by the Greek government) and is informally consulted on a regular basis by the British 

Foreign Office, the US State Department and the British Army, as well as by US, European and south 

European think tanks. He is also a regular keynote speaker at conferences on organized crime, 

globalization, south-eastern Europe and US–Europe relations. 

UK Publisher Random House 

US Publisher Knopf 

Delivery March 2007 



Length 100,000-110,000 words 

Agent CBC 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Knopf), Brazil (Comphania das Letras), Canada (Anansi), 

Finland (Tammi), France (Denoël), Germany (DVA), Japan (Kobunsha), Israel (Books in the Attic), Italy 

(Mondadori), Netherlands (Ambo Anthos), Norway (Gyldendal), Spain (Destino), Sweden (Norstedts) 

58

SPRINGFIELD ROAD 

Salena Godden 

A true story of heartbreaking beauty 


Non-fiction 

SPRINGFIELD ROAD is the childhood story of Salena Godden, born to a Jamaican go-go dancer 

mother and an Irish jazz musician in Hastings, England in the early 70s. Salena’s upbringing was 

meant to be sunny days and the silver Jubilee, but fate threw Salena, her older brother Gustave into a 

different direction. Her father left them, with no explanation, and Salena’s mother, after living alone 

and eking out a living, married a horrible disciplinarian who wouldn’t allow Salena or her brother to be 

in the house without an adult present. When Salena’s father comes back for a visit, she begins to see 

what her ‘real dad’ is like. 

This is a story of loss, love and the redemptive power of family while growing up multi-cultural in an 

uncertain Britain. 

Salena Godden is in her early 30s and lives in London. She has travelled the world performing 

television and radio presenting. She has hosted workshops in schools across Britain and New York to 

inspire teenagers to write fiction and/or poetry. She is currently writing freelance for Dazed and 

Confused with regular guest spots on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. 

UK Publisher Harper Press 





Agent KCS 


59

NEGRO WITH A HAT 

Colin Grant 


Non-fiction 

At one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Mosiah Garvey was the most famous 

black man on the planet. Born into poverty in Jamaica, he travelled to London before the First World 

War and, on his return to Kingston, resolved to wage war against racial injustice. NEGRO WITH A HAT 

is that story. It’s a tale of horrendous bigotry, racial uplift, petty infighting, egotism, bad business 

management, international espionage, murder and profound tragedy. 

In 1920, Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, held its first convention 

in New York. Before a crowd of 25,000, Garvey, an awe-inspiring orator, outlined his plan to build a 

new African nation-state for the black diaspora. His ideas were contagious and soon the UNIA boasted 

more than 1,100 branches in more than 40 countries. He also launched the Black Star Shipping Line 

which was designed so that black businesses could interact with each other internationally. But 

Garvey’s lack of business experience meant that the Black Star Shipping Line was soon encumbered 

with serious financial difficulties, and Garvey’s dream of black nationalism failed when the cut-throat 

Liberian regime swindled him in land-deal negotiations. He died penniless in London, a sad, lonely 

figure. 

Colin Grant is a producer for BBC Radio 4 and is of Jamaican heritage. He is well placed to write this 

biography: long fascinated by Marcus Garvey; he developed the proposal for NEGRO WITH A HAT 

after putting together a radio documentary about Garvey’s meteoric rise to fame and rapid departure 

from the public stage. 


Delivery October 2006 




Agent KCS 

All rights available excluding world English rights (Cape/Random House) 

60


Non-fiction 

THE DOCTOR OF ZANZIBAR 

The Battle to End the African Slave Trade 

Alastair Hazell 

On the 15th June 1873, the Zanzibar slave market – where thousands men, women and children had 

been bought and sold annually – was finally closed. 

The astonishing story behind this is in part the account of a non-European colonization of Africa – long 

before the Scramble for Africa – when the Sultan of Oman decided in the 1820s to move his court 

from the Arabian Gulf to Zanzibar, in order ruthlessly to exploit the East African slave trade. An 

extraordinary move, given that the Sultan, and his successors, then brought money-changers and 

taxation officials in from India and struck wholesale deals with slave raiders far into the African 

interior, decimating entire tribes and shipping tens of thousands into captivity. 

The unknown story here is that of a young British doctor, John Kirk, who spent the majority of his 

working life trying to end the Zanzibar slave trade at a time when the British had no particular interest 

in East Africa and often refused militarily to back his efforts. Perhaps more amazingly, Kirk was neither 

an explorer nor a soldier. He was in fact a botanist, a classifier of plants, and a medical doctor. 

In THE DOCTOR OF ZANZIBAR, Alastair Hazell interweaves four years’ research of personal and 

national histories into a compelling and resonant chronicle, at the centre of which is the intersection of 

Islam and slavery. 

Alastair Hazell was raised in Malawi in the 60s, surrounded by neighbours there who viewed the 

Nyasa Slave Wars, which had ended just 70 years earlier, as very recent history: a sense of historical 

connection which stuck with Alastair when he studied at Cambridge, and on through the seven years 

during which he ran Macmillan Africa. Thereafter Alastair founded a financial information company, 

the successful sale of which allowed him to set up a couple of other business and to run an African 

NGO, and devote himself to these primary sources. He’s now 54. 

UK Publisher Constable & Robinson 

Delivery January 2008 

UK Publication January 2009 


Length 80,000-100,000 words 

Agent PW 


61


Non-fiction 

KALASH! 

AK47 – The Story of the People’s Gun 

Michael Hodges 

Since its inception in the late 1940s in Russia, the Kalashnikov rifle has become the most ubiquitous 

and successful killing machine the world has ever known The United Nations has made a conservative 

estimate that there are between 70,000,000 and 100,000,000 of the weapons in existence today. 

KALASH! tells a remarkable story of the people’s gun, tracing it back to the birth of its inventor Mikhail 

Kalashnikov on a family farm on the Steppes of the Kazakstan-Mongolian border, through its many 

incarnations in many different countries and conflicts, to its current place as a potent symbol of 

revolution, liberation and terror around the world. 

Hungary, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq, Breslan – you name the place, there’s a Kalash waiting 

for you. It is also the only gun in history to become a superbrand, its name adorning vodka bottles, Tshirts 

and mouse-mats. Unbelievably, you can now buy an MP3 player to slip into the ammunition 

magazine of your Kalash so you can listen to music while you kill. 

General Kalashnikov has agreed to work exclusively with the author on the project. 

Michael Hodges has reported extensively from Iraq and Palestine over the past three years. He 

came under Kalashnikov fire while patrolling first with the US army in the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad 

and then with the British army in southern Iraq. During the early 1980s he lived in the Middle East 

and witnessed Palestinian unrest in the West Bank and Jerusalem and the 1982 Israeli invasion of 

Lebanon. From 1999 to 2003, as executive editor of Maxim – the biggest-selling men’s magazine in 

the world – he was part of the team that launched the Maxim brand in more than 15 countries. He is 

now editor-at-large of Time Out, London. 





Agent CBC 


62

ITALY'S SORROW 

A Year of War: 1944-45 

James Holland 


Non-fiction 

Not since Napoleonic times had the Italian peninsula witnessed such widespread war and bloodshed 

as it did in the last year of World War II. Chaos and disorder reigned. Mussolini and his new Republic 

had no real power; they were little more than Hitler’s stooges, while Marshal Badoglio headed what 

amounted to a puppet government in the south; real authority in the southern half of the country was 

held by the Allied Military Government established by Britain and America. 

Consequently, in large parts of northern Italy, civilians found themselves caught between the devil 

and the deep blue sea. They supported the Partisans on pain of death, but faced severe retribution if 

they were seen to be collaborating with the Fascists. Hunger and poverty frequently forced terrible 

decisions upon them. The typhoon of steel that raged up the leg of Italy wreaked unimaginable 

destruction. The Allies had to defeat Nazi Germany – utterly and completely; that was the brief. The 

Germans had to prevent it. If Italians and their towns and villages got in the way, then so be it. 

ITALY’S SORROW will be based on the hundreds of interviews that James Holland has conducted over 

the last two years with survivors from all sides of this internecine conflict – ranging from the Partisans 

to Royalists members of the various Fascist organisations, from the Allies to the Germans and all the 

political shades – as well as extensive research into written records of what was the fiercest fighting 

of the entire war. It will be a work of historical reportage, telling the story through the experiences of 

those who were there. 

James Holland is the author of two novels: THE BURNING BLUE, which is set against the backdrop 

of the Battle of Britain, and A PAIR OF SILVER WINGS, both published by Heinemann. In 2003, he 

published his first work of history, FORTRESS MALTA, which became a Sunday Times top 10 

bestseller. The sequel, TOGETHER WE STAND: North Africa 1942-1943, was published this year. He is 

36. 

UK Publisher HarperCollins 

US Publisher St Martin's Press 





Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Italy (Longanesi) 

63


Non-fiction 

THE FORGE OF CHRISTENDOM 

The Eleventh Century and the Making of the West 

Tom Holland 

Praise for RUBICON and PERSIAN FIRE, both shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 

A terrific read and a remarkable piece of scholarship. As an introduction to Roman history, it is unlikely to be 

bettered 

– DAILY MAIL on RUBICON 

Fresh and vivid... there is no better and clearer guide to the tangled political events of 100-44 BC… if a new 

readership is to be won for ancient history, it is books like this that will pave the way 

– Frank McLynn, NEW STATESMAN, on RUBICON 

Tom Holland’s masterly study brings the Persians to vivid life… [a] panoramic and gripping book 

– OBSERVER on PERSIAN FIRE 

Confident, fluent and accessible, and with salutary lessons for our own times, this is history at its best 

– THE TIMES on PERSIAN FIRE 

At a time when the cultural identity of Europe is such a pressing issue, THE FORGE OF CHRISTENDOM 

looks back to the eleventh century, the period when the boundaries and character of Western 

Christendom were first being firmly set. 

The century begins amid millennial panic, fostered by a widespread sense that the world is coming to 

an end: the Christian kingdoms of the Mediterranean are being attacked by Saracen raiders, those of 

the north by Vikings; the kingdoms themselves are fragmenting; disease and anarchy are increasingly 

rife. It ends with the First Crusade, and a Christendom that has not merely endured, but proved itself 

triumphantly expansionist, with its banners planted in the Muslim heartlands, on the ramparts of 

Jerusalem itself. A century fundamental, in other words, to the whole future course of European 

history – for it ensures that the very notion of Christendom will survive. 

Tom Holland is the author of RUBICON: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (Time 

Warner, 2003) and PERSIAN FIRE: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (Time Warner, 

2005). He has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio, and lives in London 

with his wife and two small children. 


US Publisher Doubleday 




Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Netherlands (Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep) 

64

THE KRONOS GENERATION 

Carl Honoré 


Non-fiction 

Childhood is under threat. We no longer look on it as a separate stage of life, as a time of anarchy 

and wonder with its own rules and rhythms. Instead, we treat children like mini-adults. From the 

moment of conception, we start fretting over how to perfect them, how to help them steal a march on 

their peers, how to fill up every moment of their day with useful activity. At the same time, we 

mollycoddle the young, driven by fear to forbid them to walk to school or play outside alone. In this 

perfectionist, competitive age, we want to give our children the best of everything and make them the 

best at everything. The result is a new and damaging culture of ‘hyper-parenting.’ No longer 

something that comes naturally, parenting is now a skill to be studied, agonized over and mastered; it 

is a competitive sport. 

THE KRONOS GENERATION will expose the folly of striving obsessively to raise an alpha child, and 

show how everyone can benefit from a more relaxed, playful approach to parenting. Using stories 

from real parents and children, the book will take the reader from Asia to North America to Europe to 

visit classrooms, playgrounds, a virginity retreat, summer camps, sport centres, a Harry Potter 

convention, toy companies, television studios, computer labs, a video-gaming conference, a child 

beauty pageant, a plastic-surgery clinic for teens and more. 

Carl Honoré is a Canadian-born, London-based correspondent for several American and Canadian 

newspapers. Previously he spent three years in South America stringing for a range of magazines 

from the Economist and the Guardian in the UK to the Chicago Tribune and Time in the US. 

UK Publisher Orion 

US Publisher HarperCollins SanFrancisco 

Delivery May 2007 




Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Editora Record), France (Hachette Livre), Korea 

(Basecamp), Netherlands (Lemniscaat), Spain (RBA) 

65


Non-fiction 

DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD 

An Unauthorised Autobiography 

Sebastian Horsley 

When Mother found out she was pregnant with me she took an overdose. Father gave her the pills. She needed a 

drama from time to time to remind her that she was still alive. The overdose didn’t work. The flow of life in me 

was too strong even for the violence Mother had done it. Had she known I would turn out like this she would 

have taken cyanide... 

– Extract from DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD 

Sebastian's mother was an alcoholic who regularly attempted suicide, and his father a drunk and 

crippled billionaire who left him when he was young. As a 21 year old man, he embarked on a 

relationship with Jimmy Boyle (Scotland's most notorious gangster and murderer who was also 

sleeping with Sebastian’s wife.) 

DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD charts Sebastian Horsley's years as a dandy, an artist, a visitor of 

prostitutes (and a period as a prostitute), his time as a sex-advice columnist, his love affairs, his 

descent into heroin and crack addiction, his desperate attempts and even more desperate failures to 

overcome it, his Crucifixion and his eventual success in finding a kind of peace. 

This is a man who, in every conceivable way, has lived a life of extremes. Sebastian is at once 

monstrous and loveable, hugely arrogant and painfully vulnerable. Full of Quentin Crisp quips and 

Wildean aphorism DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD is a painfully honest and painfully funny book which 

demonstrates that he has also the ability to laugh at himself. 

Sebastian Horsley is a man who has done everything in a culture where people are famous for 

doing nothing. In the tradition of Byron, Thomas DeQuincy, Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp… at last 

we have a new English eccentric. 

In 2000 Sebastian went to the Philippines to be Crucified. Sarah Lucas made a film of the event, 

which was shown at the ICA. The Sun dubbed him ‘Art Freak’. 

The Observer fired him as their sex columnist for being ‘too graphic’. 

When he appeared on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show the switchboard was jammed with complaints. 

But there is so much more to his life… 

UK Publisher Sceptre 





Agent PW 


66


Non-fiction 

SEX AND THE PSYCHE 

The Secret World of Sexual Fantasy 

Brett Kahr 

Although Europeans appear to be sexually liberal, we still possess enormous anxieties, fears, 

inhibitions, and shame in relation to our sexual lives. We may purport to be sexually free and 

confident whilst at the pub, but in private, many individuals experience ongoing, internal misery about 

their sexual lives. 

This amazing book emerges from the world’s largest-ever survey of sexual fantasies: a sample of over 

15,000 people who had each to complete a 32-page questionnaire before Brett Kahr then chose a 

core group to be interviewed at great length at his London practice. But the survey results are just 

part of SEX AND THE PSYCHE. Kahr will be drawing also on his 25 years of running a psychiatric 

practice which specialises in relationship and sexuality issues. 

Doing for the mind what Kinsey did for the body, SEX AND THE PSYCHE will, not surprisingly, be 

packed with revelations and research – about, for example, the plasticity of fantasies, or the 

difference between publicly admitted and private fantasies. 

Brett Kahr is a psychotherapist who has worked in mental health for 25 years. He has qualifications 

from Oxford and Yale, and can be heard in regular slots on BBC Radio 2. He is a prolific author and 

has worked as an advisor on Fame Academy, Operatunity and Big Brother yet is equally at home in 

front of an audience as a distinguished West End pianist and composer. 

UK Publisher Penguin Press 

US Publisher Perseus 



Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Distribuidora Record de Servicos de Imprensa), 

Canada (Penguin), France (Editions Bernard Grasset), Germany (Ullstein Buchverlag), Italy (Ponte Alle Grazie), 

Netherlands (De Boekerij BV), Norway (Bazar Forlag), Poland (Albatros), Portugal (Publicacoes Dom Quixote), 

Spain (Ediciones Martinez Roca) 

67

REAL ENGLAND 

Paul Kingsnorth 


Non-fiction 

In REAL ENGLAND, Paul Kingsnorth bears witness to the death of an old England and the birth of a 

new – the decline of an England in which the small, the ancient, the indefinable, the meaningful, the 

interesting and the quirky are being systematically scoured out and bulldozed to make way for the 

clean, the sophisticated, the alien, the progressive, the corporate. The things that make our 

landscapes different, distinctive or special are being eroded, and replaced by things which would be 

familiar anywhere: the same chain shops in every high street; the same bricks in every new housing 

estate; the same signs on every road; the same menu in every pub. The result is stark: everywhere is 

becoming the same as everywhere else. Everywhere is becoming slicker, more corporate, more 

remote, less real. We are witnessing the McDonaldisation of England. 

What does it mean to be an individual in the twenty-first century? Can individuality survive in the age 

of a global market that demands uniformity of appearance, mass production, standardization of 

culture and standardization of taste? Why must we cease to value the distinctiveness of where we 

are? Must we really become consumers on a faceless, placeless international trading floor? In REAL 

ENGLAND, Paul Kingsnorth exposes the widespread elimination of character and authenticity from the 

landscape we all live in, explaining why it is happening, who is responsible and who is fighting to 

change it while, at the same time, offering a vision of a future in which money, bureaucracy and 

blinkered economic ideology do not combine to reshape our culture in the interests of global 

corporations. 

Paul Kingsnorth is a writer and environmental campaigner who first became involved in the green 

movement while studying at Oxford, when, as a 19-year-old student, he was sucked into the 

embryonic road-protest campaigns. Since then he has written prolifically on environmental and global 

political issues for publications including the Guardian and Independent, Big Issue and BBC Wildlife 

magazines. As well as being a former deputy editor of the Ecologist magazine, Paul is an awardwinning 

poet. 

UK Publisher Portobello 


UK Publication December 2008 



Agent PW 


68


Non-fiction 

QUANTUM 

Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of 

Reality 

Manjit Kumar 

QUANTUM is the first popular book to tell the extraordinary story of quantum theory, and the great 

intellectual debate that it ignited. As well as providing a gripping account of the birth and 

development of a scientific idea, it chronicles the social and political upheavals that inspired the 

quantum revolution and shows how quantum theory has, in turn, revolutionized our lives. 

At its heart, QUANTUM is the story of the remarkable men behind the golden age of physics (Planck, 

Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac) – a very human and tangled story of 

love, tragedy and rivalry, as well as muddle, mistakes, intuition, creativity and disappointment. 

Albert Einstein was one of the first to recognize the radical nature of quantum theory. It was his 1905 

paper on the quantum that he considered ‘very revolutionary’, not the one on relativity for which he is 

chiefly remembered. And for 35 years Einstein was locked in a fierce battle with the Danish 

theoretician Niels Bohr over what quantum theory actually meant, a debate that continues to this day. 

In taking the story up to the present, QUANTUM shows how Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of 

physicists and how, nearly 50 years after his death, Einstein has been finally vindicated. 

Manjit Kumar is the founding editor and publisher of Prometheus, an interdisciplinary journal with a 

distinguished editorial board that covers the arts, sciences and humanities. He has a BSc in physics 

and an MSc in quantum fields and fundamental forces from Imperial College of Science, Technology 

and Medicine in London, and a BA in philosophy from the University of London. Between 1993 and 

1996, he gave courses at the City Literary Institute in London on a variety of topics including ‘Science 

and Religion in Historical Perspective’, ‘Science and Rationality’ and ‘Quantum: A Beginner’s Guide to 

Twentieth-century Physics’. He is the co-author with John Gillott of SCIENCE AND THE RETREAT 

FROM REASON (Merlin Press/Monthly Review Press, 1997). 

UK Publisher FourthEstate 

US Publisher 4th Estate 


US Publication Spring 2007 



Agent PT 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Croatia (Izvori), France (Jean-Claude Lattes), Germany 

(Berlin), Greece (Patakis), Italy (Arnoldo Mondadori), Japan (Soshisha), Netherlands (Ambo Anthos), Norway (N. 

W. Damm), Spain (Salamandra), Sweden (Norstedts) 

69


Non-fiction 

THE FIRST PSYCHIC 

The Peculiar Mystery of a Notorious Victorian Wizard 

Peter Lamont 

Praise for THE RISE OF THE INDIAN ROPE TRICK 

A short, sharp little book… wonderfully entertaining 

– THE TIMES 

A labour of love. Lamont disentangles the gargantuan knot of lies and sets the record straight with a joyful 

vengeance 

– THE NEW YORK TIMES 

A fascinating, quirky and authoritative investigation into the world’s greatest mystery 

– Simon Singh 

On the evening of Sunday 13 December 1868, a remarkable event took place in the Westminster 

home of Viscount Adare. A thirty-five-year-old man, whose extraordinary exploits had already made 

him something of a sensation, floated out of one third-floor window and in through another. 

This was the most notorious of many feats performed by Daniel Douglas Home, a low-born Scot who 

became an international celebrity by convincing the rich and famous that tables floated, that spirit 

hands materialized and that he himself could levitate. Home is virtually unknown today, but everybody 

who was anybody in Victorian society, and many who were not, had a strong opinion about him. 

He was hated by Dickens, defended by Thackeray, denounced by Faraday and mysterious to Darwin. 

He was insulted by Tolstoy, praised by Mark Twain and patronized by Napoleon III. When he married 

a god-daughter of the Tsar of Russia, his best man was Alexandre Dumas. Home was the only subject 

upon which Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning disagreed. And the question that divided them was 

the same one asked by the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science: 

how did he do it? 

THE FIRST PSYCHIC investigates the changing fortunes of a man whose life challenged the Victorian 

obsession with both science and religion, a man who baffled the establishment so much that they 

coined the word ‘psychic’ to describe him. It is the story of a controversial Victorian celebrity and of 

the strange and seemingly inexplicable events that occurred in his presence. 

Peter Lamont is a research fellow at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, University of Edinburgh. He 

specializes in the history and psychology of magic and psychic phenomena, and is a past winner of 

the Jeremiah Dalziel prize in Birtish history. He has also worked professionally as a magician and 

psychic, and has performed and lectured across the world. His first book, THE RISE OF THE INDIAN 

ROPE TRICK, was published in 2003 by Little, Brown in the UK and Thunder’s Mouth in the US to wide 

critical acclaim. 


UK Publication 18 August 2005 


Agent PT 


70

THE SCENT TRAIL 

Celia Lyttleton 


Non-fiction 

A definitive account of the history of scent, THE SCENT TRAIL is a fascinating and beautifully 

illustrated journey to the heart of a vanishing world. It opens with Celia Lyttleton’s visit to a bespoke 

perfumer, who over the course of several hours asks Celia numerous questions: about her past, the 

smells from her childhood and the memories they evoked, her favourite sounds and her favourite 

colours. Gradually, using a palette of over five hundred smells, he creates a unique scent that only 

Celia will wear. 

Focusing on the ten key ingredients of this scent, Celia has travelled along the three major scent trails 

through Europe, Asia and the Middle East. She sources the ingredients, and meets and interviews 

those who harvest, ship, distil, create and sell scent, from peasants in Turkey and Bulgaria, through 

scent merchants in the souks of Damascus, to the ‘Noses’ of the scent-makers in the south of France 

– all the while travelling the same routes that have been used by merchants for thousands of years. 

THE SCENT TRAIL ends with Celia’s opening her bottle of bespoke scent and her experiencing the 

fruits and memories of her travels. 

Celia Lyttleton has been interested in scent from an early age: its ephemeral nature, its peculiar 

chemical qualities and the extraordinary myths that surround its history. An acclaimed art critic, she 

has written for numerous magazines, papers and journals around the world, ranging from Vogue, Elle 

Decoration, Tatler, World of Interiors, Harpers & Queen and Talk Magazine to Art & Auction in the US 

and the Evening Standard, Saturday Telegraph and Independent in the UK. She is the author of two 

specialist design books, THE NOW ART BOOK and FLOATING WORLDS, both of which were published 

in Japan. 

UK Publisher Transworld 



Length 256 pages (including black and white illustrations) 

Agent CBC 


71


Non-fiction 

I LOVE YOU BUT I'M NOT IN LOVE WITH YOU 

Andrew G. Marshall 

It is a phrase that many of us have heard or have spoken, and can be an achingly frustrating rejection 

to bear for the person on the receiving end, but what exactly does it mean, and is there hope for a 

relationship if one partner is beginning to feel ‘I love you but…’? 

Examining the causes of the phenomenon which is now ubiquitous among couples attending therapy, 

the leading therapist and journalist Andrew G. Marshall aims to help readers to get a grip on the crisis 

and to recover their relationship before counselling is necessary. He may be doing himself out of a 

job, but Andrew firmly believes that, if caught soon enough, the trend can be reversed and couples 

can regain security, intimacy and deep trust; to feel confident and confidently ‘in’ love. His ideas will 

almost certainly cause friction at first, as a central theme of the book is that we should strive to define 

ourselves against our partners as much as alongside them, but there’s every chance that the post-’I 

love you but…’ relationship will be stronger than ever before. Written with a practical focus, the book 

is inclusive enough also to inform those who feel that the confession may have been a smokescreen 

for hidden issues in a relationship; as well as those wanting to understand the end of a previous 

relationship to avoid encountering the same situation again. 

Andrew G. Marshall is a therapist with almost 20 years’ experience counselling couples for Relate 

and other organizations. Currently president of the British Men’s Counselling Association, he is best 

known in the UK for his weekly ‘Psychobabble’ column in The Times. He is a regular contributor to 

broadsheet newspapers and women’s magazines, and his self-help articles are syndicated around the 

world. He is also an experienced broadcaster who has hosted daily radio shows and guested regularly 

on UK Living TV. 


UK Publication 3 July 2006 


Agent EJ 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Record), Canada (Penguin Canada), Finland 

(Otava), France (Hachette/Marabout), Germany (Krueger Verlag/Fischer), Greece (Kritiki), Italy 

(Corbaccio/Longanesi), Japan (Aspect Corp), Netherlands (House of Books), Sweden (Norstedts) 

72


Non-fiction 

BEING WELL 

How a few small changes really can make a BIG difference 

Alan Maryon Davis 

BEING WELL is more than a handy guide to healthy living. Aimed primarily at the younger end of the 

older persons’ market, it focuses on motivational triggers and self-help tools in ten key lifestyle areas 

that can have a major impact on health: diet & nutrition; physical activity; stress, relaxation & sleep; 

sex; smoking; drinking; drugs (including prescribed medication); oral health, skincare (including feet) 

& sunbathing; check-ups, male and female; and developing a positive approach to life. 

Its essential message is that healthy living doesn’t have to mean an end to pleasure and enjoyment. 

Nor that you have to turn your life upside-down. Small changes really can make a big difference. A 

few, simple, very do-able steps can put you well on the path to a healthier, happier life. 

Informative but accessible, with a light-hearted approach and lots of practical checklists, handy hints, 

aides-memoir and progress charts, BEING WELL is the essential motivator, reference guide and routemap 

to health rolled into a single volume. A must-have for anyone who wants to enjoy life – for 

longer. 

Alan Maryon Davis is the author of nine popular books on health topics ranging from first aid to 

controlling cholesterol, and for 17 years wrote a weekly ‘dear doctor’ column in Woman magazine. He 

has been an expert guest on dozens of TV and radio programmes, was the BBC Radio 1 ‘doc’ for two 

years and presented his own award-winning series on heart health on BBC Radio 4. He is senior 

lecturer in public health at Kings College London, and current chair of the Royal Institute of Public 

Health. 

UK Publisher Heyday 





Agent PW 


73


Non-fiction 

LIVE WORKING OR DIE FIGHTING 

How the Working Class Went Global 

Paul Mason 

When Frederick Winslow Taylor noticed 'worker Schmidt' lifting bars of pig iron at the Bethlehem Steel 

works in Pennsylvania, USA, in 1898, he knew he was on to something: a model worker whose output 

could be measured and used as a yardstick to test two things: the efficiency of the other workers and 

the efficiency of management methods. Modern management theory was born. You could do far 

more, Taylor told Schmidt, 'if you really tried'. 

A hundred years later, we're all worker Schmidt; and here Paul Mason tells for the first time the 

history of the working class from the perspective of the global present. He explores the main themes 

in a narrative that skips from the modern workshop of the world (China) to the original one 

(northwest England in the first half of the nineteenth century) - and touches down at all points in 

between. Here history lives side by side with the present, in a narrative that interweaves the broader 

social, economic and political threads with moving first-hand testimony and cutting-edge reportage. 

As Mason points out, until now the history of the working class, and the social movements it created, 

could be written about only in national compartments. But as economic reality activates the synaptic 

connections between workers on different continents, it is now possible to speak of a global working 

class. Charting the story of urban slums, strikes, brass bands, military movements, revolutions and 

resistance, unionism, factory occupations and more, he reveals the recurrent trends in working-class 

movements and communities and the traditions and skills we have lost. 

Alive with the voices of remarkable individuals, LIVE WORKING OR DIE FIGHTING provides a 

captivating backdrop for today's anti-globalization movement. Tracing the origins of the activism that 

we now see in Seattle, Edinburgh or Genoa, it is filled with stories from China, Nigeria, the United 

States, India, Bolivia, Iraq and Argentina and helps us understand where today's protest movement is 

coming from and what it is aiming for. Energetic and entertaining, it celebrates a common history, 

across the globe, of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two 

hundred years ago. 

Paul Mason is the BBC’s Business and Industry Correspondent on Newsnight. He has led the 

programme’s coverage of issues ranging from Britain’s firefighters’ strike and railway crisis to 

corporate scandals such as Enron, Worldcom and Parmalat. In 2004 he won the Wincott Award for 

Business Journalism for his series of three films on the political economy of China. More recently he 

has reported from Baton Rouge on Hurricane Katrina and covered the US oil-for-food programme. 

UK Publisher Secker/Random House 




Agent PT 


74

SUNSHINE 

A Love Affair 

Robert Mighall 


Non-fiction 

Robert Mighall is obsessed with sunshine. Addicted. Known as ‘Gecko Boy’ to his neighbours, who 

often find him up a ladder, catching the few last rays of the descending sun, he knows where and for 

how long there will be patches of sunlight after work in the summer, and religiously pursues them in 

strict order around his home in Bloomsbury. 

SUNSHINE tells the story of our relationship with this elusive entity through Robert's own quest to 

understand his remote and fickle mistress. Put more simply, it is about the pursuit of happiness. It has 

that magic of an obsessive writing about his or her obsession, such as TULIP or WATERLOG, and 

celebrates something to which most of us feel a potent primal attraction, but which has strangely 

eluded serious or sustained attention in print. No one has quite got under the skin of our devotion to 

this stuff, which hits you with a sense of homecoming when you step onto the tarmac of a foreign 

airport, or which the cat – who knows nothing of metaphysics or allegory – serenely worships. 

Aimed at the market for such titles as James Hamilton-Paterson's SEVEN TENTHS and Charles 

Sprawson's HAUNTS OF THE BLACK MASSEUR, it will question what our relationship with sunshine 

actually is – what it is exactly that happens chemically, emotionally, associatively, aesthetically and 

metaphysically when we seek out, and bask in, a patch of that fleeting, fantastical golden light. In 

pursuing sunshine and its myriad meanings Robert is led into a broader exploration of the great 

themes: Happiness, Love, Memory, Worship, and the quest for Fulfillment. 

Robert Mighall is in his late thirties, whip-smart and, it goes without saying, always tanned. 

Although professionally now a copywriter/branding consultant, Robert was a junior fellow at Oxford 

before then spending three years as the Editor of the Penguin Classic Series and has contributed 

numerous introductions and essays to academic titles published variously by OUP, Everyman and 

Penguin – on Dickens, aspects of the Gothic, Oscar Wilde and so on. As a sideline, he writes 

occasional travel and review pieces for the national press. This is his first book. 

UK Publisher John Murray 





Agent PW 


75


Non-fiction 

DECIPHERING 137 

Jung, Pauli and the Quest for the Primal Number 

Arthur I. Miller 

In the words of the physicist Richard Feynman, '137 has been a mystery ever since it was discovered 

more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and 

worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number comes from. Nobody knows. 

It’s one of the damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by 

man.' 

Now, for the first time, Arthur I. Miller tells the full story of the quest to solve the enigma of 137, a 

number that seems to hint at the origins of the universe itself. It’s a story that encompasses many of 

the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, as well as taking readers back to the roots of modern 

science, steeped as they are in mysticism and ancient history. It explores how physicists discover 

fundamental concepts, probes the relationship between mathematics, the mind and the real world, 

and reveals how one man's discoveries pushed him beyond the fundamental assumptions of scientific 

rationalism into exploring the human psyche. 

At the heart of the narrative are the intimate lives of the brilliant but disturbed physicist Wolfgang 

Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, to whom Pauli turned to for help. Although polar 

opposites in temperament, both men were obsessed with 137. They became firm friends and 

corresponded for more than twenty years. Pauli also kept extensive records of his dreams, though he 

had to conceal them from his wife, who destroyed those she found. In writing the book, the author 

aims to draw on much of this and other rare and important material, much of which has only recently 

become available. 

Arthur I. Miller is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College 

London. He is the author of several acclaimed books, the most recent of which are EINSTEIN, 

PICASSO (Basic, 2001) and EMPIRE OF THE STARS (Little, Brown/Houghton Mifflin, 2005), which was 

shortlisted for the 2006 Aventis Prize for Science Books. An experienced broadcaster, lecturer and 

biographer, he is noted for being able to write engagingly about complex social and intellectual 

dramas, weaving the personal with the scientific to produce page-turners that read like novels. 

US Publisher Norton 


US Publication Spring 2008 



Agent PT 

All rights available excluding world English (Norton), Germany (DVA), Japan (Soshisha) 

76


Non-fiction 

EMPIRE OF THE STARS 

Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes 

Arthur I. Miller 

Shortlisted for the 2006 Aventis Prize for Science Books 

Remarkable… a story that needed to be told 

– Roger Penrose 

A fascinating book 

– Martin Rees, SUNDAY TIMES 

Fascinating… a quite brilliant account… based on meticulous and thoughtful research 

– Graham Farmelo, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 

Ever since the evocative term was coined in 1967, black holes have assumed an almost mystical 

appeal for the public. EMPIRE OF THE STARS is the first book to tell the story of their discovery – a 

remarkable tale of friendship, rivalry and betrayal. 

In August 1930, the 20-year-old Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chadrasekhar (Chandra) 

calculated that certain stars could end their lives by collapsing indefinitely to a point. But Sir Arthur 

Eddington, the grand-old man of British astronomy, ridiculed the idea at a meeting of the Royal 

Astronomical Society in 1935. Chandra abandoned his work and emigrated to the US. Although his 

discovery was eventually recognized with a Nobel Prize in 1983, the episode damaged him 

professionally and personally and set back astrophysics for 40 years. 

EMPIRE OF THE STARS teases out the major implications of this infamous event, setting it against the 

backdrop of the turbulent growth of astrophysics. As such, it also follows the rise of the two great 

theories of twentieth-century science – relativity and quantum mechanics – which meet head on in 

black holes. In the ensuing clash of personalities, epochs and nationalities, EMPIRE OF THE STARS 

reveals the deep-seated psychological and philosophical prejudices at work in the acceptance and 

rejection of new scientific ideas: prejudices that create resistance to the idea of black holes even 

today. 

Arthur I. Miller is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College 

London. He is the author of several acclaimed books, the most recent of which are EINSTEIN, 

PICASSO (Basic, 2001) and EMPIRE OF THE STARS (Little, Brown/Houghton Mifflin, 2005), which was 

shortlisted for the 2006 Aventis Prize for Science Books. An experienced broadcaster, lecturer and 

biographer, he is noted for being able to write engagingly about complex social and intellectual 

dramas, weaving the personal with the scientific to produce page-turners that read like novels. 

UK Publisher Little, Brown/Time Warner 

US Publisher Houghton Mifflin 

UK Publication 17 March 2005 

US Publication 25 April 2005 


Agent PT 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US (Houghton), France (Jean-Claude Lattes), Germany (DVA), 

Greece (Travlos), Italy (Codice Edizioni), Japan (Soshisha), Korea (Prunsoop), Poland (Albatros) 

77


Non-fiction 

WEDLOCK 

How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met his Match 

Wendy Moore 

Praise for THE KNIFE MAN 

a stunning, gruesomely compelling biography… Brilliant 

– Alison Weir 

Moore’s tireless devotion to detail brings the man and his maverick career vividly, compellingly, gruesomely to life 

– THE NEW YORK TIMES 

With the death of her coal magnate father when she was just 11, Mary Eleanor Bowes became the 

richest heiress in Britain. Beset by admirers and fortune seekers, Mary was nonetheless a highly 

intelligent young woman who pursued her own intellectual interests into adulthood. Yet just as she 

had resigned herself to a married life of dutiful domesticity, a charming young army hero blew onto 

the London scene: ‘Captain’ Andrew Robinson Stoney. Torn between her two lovers Mary was a rabbit 

caught in lamplight. So when Stoney then insisted on defending her honour in a duel, Mary was 

convinced that she had at last found true love. They married four days later. She was 26. 

Sadly, the ‘Captain’ was not what he seemed. In reality, a scheming and debt-ridden lieutenant who 

had faked the duel solely to secure Lady Strathmore’s hand, his money troubles were so notorious 

that he would inspire the term ‘stony broke’. No sooner had he duped the Countess of Strathmore into 

accompanying him down the aisle, than he embarked on a relentless campaign of physical and mental 

torture. Repeatedly beaten, kicked, pinched, scratched, burnt and whipped, the Countess was denied 

visitors or letters, refused the food and clothing that she desired, and could only watch helplessly as 

her ancestral homes were neglected or sold, her beloved conservatories and hothouses were disposed 

of and her fortune was squandered. Servants saw her husband lock her in a cupboard, force her to 

eat potatoes until she was sick and threaten to kill her at knifepoint. Meanwhile, her husband – 

adopting the Bowes family nam after their marriage – brought prostitutes into the house, raped the 

nursemaids and sired numerous illegitimate children. 

The story of how she escaped (after eight years), commenced divorce proceedings, was recaptured 

by Stoney to be dragged accross snow-covered moors half way to Ireland, and eventually freed when 

a group of plucky villagers attacked her captor, is gripping. More extraordinary than this is that at a 

time when total subservience was demanded of wives by Georgian law, she exacted revenge by 

dragging him victoriously through the law courts. WEDLOCK will inject fresh blood into that market for 

histories of extraordinary Georgian women. 

Wendy Moore has written across the spectrum from the Observer to the BMJ, and from the 

Independent on Sunday to the Guardian. Having long specialised in medical stories, Wendy drew on 

that expertise for her first trade book, THE KNIFE MAN, which was published last year to fantastic 

coverage by Bantam in the UK and by Broadway in the States. She is 43 years old. 


US Publisher Crown 




Length 90,000-100,000 words 

Agent PW 


78


Non-fiction 

DON’T RHYME FOR THE SAKE OF RIDDLIN’ 

Chuck D and the Story of Public Enemy 

Russell Myrie 

The Authorised Biography of One of the Biggest Hip-Hop Bands Ever 

Public Enemy is the greatest hip-hop group of all time. And hip-hop is the greatest, most innovative 

and relevant musical genre of modern times. Does that make Public Enemy the greatest group of 

recent years? Many would argue that that is definitely the case. They must have been doing 

something right to sell over 20 million albums throughout their career. 

Yo Bum Rush The Show! Public Enemy’s debut 1987 album and its 1988 follow up It Takes A Nation 

Of Millions To Hold Us Back dominated not only hip-hop but popular music as a whole. Public Enemy 

were responsible for making the genre synonymous with black consciousness. Largely due to lead 

rapper Chuck D's powerful lyrics, a whole generation of youths across the world became politically 

aware. It surprised many that despite their politics, Public Enemy were just as popular with white 

consumers as they were with black ones. However, it could be argued that P.E. attracted a white 

audience because of their politics. Maybe this is because modern mainstream audiences were far 

more progressive than their parents perhaps would have been. 

DON'T RHYME FOR THE SAKE OF RIDDLIN’ will take the reader inside the world of one of the truly 

dangerous groups of modern times. It will chart their inception, success and failures, and, importantly, 

their legacy. 

Russell Myrie is editor at the influential British magazine, The Voice. Myrie regularly freelances for 

the Independent, and has interviewed hip-hop stars like 50 Cent and Chuck D. This is his first book. 

UK Publisher Canongate 





Agent KCS 

All rights available excluding world English (Canongate) 

79

ENOUGH! 

John Naish 


Non-fiction 

If you were compelled to spend your life’s precious time and energy in the pursuit of things you didn’t 

need, didn’t really want and ultimately didn’t enjoy, you’d feel sorely misused. But that’s what 

Western life does to us now. 

After long millennia of struggle, we have reached a point in the developed world where we have all 

the material goods we could ever need in order to feel fulfilled. But increasingly we are dissatisfied, 

overweight, fearful, angry and neurotic. 

To try to feel better, we strive to get more of the things we already have: more wealth, more choice, 

more information, more entertainment, more self-esteem, more control. But it no longer works. We 

are overshooting our rainbow. We need to evolve a new skill – that of feeling fulfilled with the bounty 

we’ve got. 

It’s not easy in a world where we are bombarded by 3,500 marketing messages a day, all aimed to 

make us jealous and hungry, and surrounded by people in the same behavioural loop. 

John Naish embarks on a journey to find how we can feel fulfilled in a world where ‘more, more, 

more’ is making us miserable. He explains, for example, the latest brain studies about human 

voraciousness and exposes how the science of marketing is increasingly capitalising on it. 

He explores the absurdity of the world we are creating: in America, the self-storage industry makes 

more money than the US music business. People are now working hard to pay to hoard all the things 

they’ve worked hard for but don’t use. 

He meets some of the world’s most successful and happy people to discover how they have quietly 

jettisoned many of the wants they don’t need (for this is not about downshifting – saying Enough is 

the only practical way now to get more). 

And crucially he helps the reader, in his uniquely humorous way, to re-evaluate how they use the two 

precious commodities that they can’t have 'more' of – their time and energy, to enable them to find 

fulfilment on their own terms. 

John Naish was a bookie’s boy and factory hand, played in rock bands and lived the long-haired bikie 

life before he finally got an English and philosophy degree and fell into health journalism. He has 

written for the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror, and became The Times motoring editor, despite not 

having a car licence. He helped to launch some of Britain’s first corporate websites, but walked away 

from the dotcom boom. His first two books were THE HYPOCHONDRIAC'S HANDBOOK and PUT WHAT 

WHERE? 2,000 years of bizarre sex advice. He is a contributing editor at The Times and is writing a 

new health series commissioned by BBC television. 






Agent PW 


80

THE CLOUDSPOTTER'S GUIDE 

Gavin Pretor-Pinney 


Non-fiction 

The inaugural publication of the Cloud Appreciation Society 

Sixteen weeks in the UK Top Ten Bestseller list 

This guide is for anyone who’s sat back, stared up at the clouds, and wondered how they form, 

whether they mean it is going to rain and why that one over there looks like an elephant. It explains 

clouds – showing how and why they form by covering each of the ten types of common clouds – but 

it also explores our contradictory feelings towards them. We talk of someone having ‘a cloud hanging 

over them’, and yet our poetry, literature and art abound with celebrations of cloudy skies. Is it not 

the clouds, after all, that give the sunset its beauty? 

With black-and-white illustrations running concurrent with the text, THE CLOUDSPOTTER’S GUIDE reawakens 

the sense of wonder we felt as children when we looked up at these most transient and 

beautiful of nature’s displays. It teaches us to distinguish the different types (whose names such as 

cirrus and nimbostratus are poetry in themselves). It reveals that there is a rare type of cloud that 

forms in Queensland which gliders ‘ride’ like surfers on a wave. It explains how the US military 

chemically manipulated the clouds during the Vietnam War to make it rain on the Viet Cong. It shows 

that someone who is blessed and lucky in Iran is described as having ‘a sky always filled with clouds’. 

The Cloud Appreciation Society, from which the guide originates, is for people who believe that clouds 

are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them. Who but Club 18–30 

sun fascists would want to look up at monotonous blue skies every day? Clouds are nature’s poetry, 

and it is high time we learned to read them. They are the expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, 

and can be read like those of a person’s countenance. 

Clouds are for dreamers, and their contemplation benefits the soul. They are the Rorschach images of 

the sky, onto which we project our imaginations. So look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty and live 

life with your head in the clouds. 

Gavin Pretor-Pinney is the author of THE CLOUDSPOTTER'S GUIDE, the inaugural publication of 

the Cloud Appreciation Society, which spent months in the UK top 10 bestseller lists. Aside from this, 

he is the co-founder and creative director of the Idler, a magazine now in its twelfth year and 

described variously as ‘the world’s finest periodical’ (Time Out) and ‘truly inspired’ (Sunday 

Telegraph). THE IDLER BOOK OF CRAP TOWNS was published in September 2003, spent months in 

the bestseller lists and spawned several equally successful follow-ups. In 1996 Gavin was responsible, 

along with three other partners, for starting the UK revival of the infamous alcoholic spirit absinthe, 

and was the first to import the drink into the UK after an eighty-year ban. Besides writing for Harpers 

& Queen and the Evening Standard, Gavin has co-presented a Channel 4 programme about Action 

Man and been assistant producer on another documentary about cocktails. 

UK Publisher Sceptre 

US Publisher Perigee/Penguin Putnam 



Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Estonia (Eesti Ekspressi), France (Jean-Claude Lattes), 

Germany (Heyne (Hardback)), Italy (Guanda/Longanesi), Japan (Kawade), Netherlands (de Bezige Bij), Spain 

(Salamandra), Sweden (Damm), Taiwan (Yuan-Liou) 

81

WAVES 

Gavin Pretor-Pinney 

Author of THE CLOUDSPOTTER'S GUIDE 


Non-fiction 

When they roll up the beach and lap at our feet on seaside holidays, waves can feel like Nature’s 

mantra. Their eternal repetition seems to clear the mind and bring our lives into perspective. Waves 

are also our main means of contact with the world around us, for everything we see and everything 

we hear reaches us in the form of light or sound waves. 

Incorporating photographs, diagrams and illustrations, WAVES is a light-hearted and informative guide 

to the central role they play in our lives. It has a colour section in the middle as well as a ‘moving 

section’ – a set of web pages, designed to fit with and compliment the book, showing waves in 

motion. And peppered throughout the reader will find occasional ‘experiments’, which couldn’t be 

further from the type if thing we did in science lessons at school! They are funny, revealing and 

sometimes ridiculous ways that the reader can experience the effects of waves at first hand. 

� We are all familiar with the siren of a speeding fire engine changing note as it passes by. This 

is due to the way sound waves are affected by movement. The same principle, when applied 

to light waves, reveals the distance of neighbouring galaxies. 

� ‘Rogue' waves at sea can reach well in excess of 100ft. Though their formation is unclear, 

they are considered to be responsible for many major shipwrecks. A new method of 

interpreting satellite imagery suggests that around ten rogue waves are prowling our oceans 

at any one time. 

� A musical instrument known as the viola d’amore has six strings hidden below the 

fingerboard. These are neither plucked nor bowed like the normal strings, but vibrate in 

sympathy with them – ‘played’ by the sound waves from above. This resonance serves as a 

metaphor for love: one system set in motion by the vibrations of another. 

A great follow-up to the cult UK bestseller, THE CLOUDSPOTTER'S GUIDE 

Gavin Pretor-Pinney is the author of THE CLOUDSPOTTER'S GUIDE, the inaugural publication of 

the Cloud Appreciation Society, which spent months in the UK top 10 bestseller lists. Aside from this, 

he is the co-founder and creative director of the Idler, a magazine now in its twelfth year and 

described variously as ‘the world’s finest periodical’ (Time Out) and ‘truly inspired’ (Sunday 

Telegraph). THE IDLER BOOK OF CRAP TOWNS was published in September 2003, spent months in 

the bestseller lists and spawned several equally successful follow-ups. In 1996 Gavin was responsible, 

along with three other partners, for starting the UK revival of the infamous alcoholic spirit absinthe, 

and was the first to import the drink into the UK after an eighty-year ban. Besides writing for Harpers 

& Queen and the Evening Standard, Gavin has co-presented a Channel 4 programme about Action 

Man and been assistant producer on another documentary about cocktails. 


US Publisher Perigee/Penguin Putnam 





Agent PW 


82


Non-fiction 

SELLING YOUR FATHER'S BONES 

Brian Schofield 

Is America really responsible for global warming or other environmental problems that the world is 

facing? If so, where does Bush’s government’s attitude come from? SELLING YOUR FATHER’S BONES 

argues that the American mentality comes from Manifest Destiny, where European immigrants were 

encouraged to move to the Western hinterlands and use the bountiful virgin land as they saw fit. 

At the heart of this polemical is the story of the Nez Perce tribe, who, in 1877, after the rapacious 

growth by settlers, were forced onto an even smaller reservation. Their leader, Chief Joseph, had 

promised his father on his death bed that he would never ‘sell his father’s bones’ and move the tribe 

from their ancestral burial grounds. But how would Chief Joseph know that four young tribe members 

would get drunk on whiskey and kill 14 white settlers? Chief Joseph tried to negotiate the peace after 

the bloodbath but was met with guns. He decided to make a run for the Canadian border… 1,700 

miles away. 

Schofield will make that trek by car and by foot to bring the reader into some of the most beautiful 

stretches of wilderness in the world. Along the way he’ll be exploring the scars that America has 

inflicted on its own environment. By tracking the Nez Perce’s doomed flight he will be able to show 

the reader the history of America’s expansion and in doing so, unearth the logic of a nation which 

continually threatens to eat itself, despite its enormous natural resources. 

Brian Schofield is 31 and in 2003 he won an award for being the best British travel writer covering 

North America. He’s spent the last eight years writing for GQ, FHM, Arena and the Sunday Times. His 

assignments have included completing the New York State Adventure Triathlon, going pig-hunting in 

Okeechobee, Florida, and successfully breaking into the Wynn Las Vegas casino. He’s currently 

employed as assistant travel editor, culture and news review writer at the Sunday Times and as 

contributing editor, specialising in opinion and politics, at Arena. 

UK Publisher Harper Press 

US Publisher Simon & Schuster 





Agent KCS 


83


Non-fiction 

TIME UNLIMITED 

The Five Laws of Psychological Time and How to Control and 

Transcend Them 

Steve Taylor 

Praise for THE FALL 

Nominated by the Independent as a 2005 book of the year 

Has something of the sweep of H. G. Wells’s OUTLINE OF HISTORY... I read it straight through like a novel 


It is hard to shake the feeling that Taylor is on to something... You are provoked into thought and agreement 

– Nicholas Lezard’s paperback choice of the week in the GUARDIAN 

Why does time seem to speed up as we get older? Why do new experiences often seem to stretch 

time. Why does time seem to fly when we’re having fun or drag when we are bored or anxious? Why 

is it that a watched pot never boils? And why does time drastically slow down or disappear altogether 

in situations of pain or distress, in drug experiences, for athletes who are in the ‘zone’ or for people 

with mental disorders such as schizophrenia? 

In this groundbreaking work of popular psychology, Steve Taylor tackles head on the riddle of time. 

Taking inspiration from Einstein, he sketches out for the first time a parallel ‘theory of relativity’ that 

deals with the inner world rather than the outer, looking at the factors that influence psychological 

time – that is, time as we perceive and experience it. Drawing on an impressive range of disciplines 

from child psychology and cognitive science to physics and anthropology, he reveals how we can learn 

to control the flow of psychological time and alter our perceptions so that we experience more of it. 

We don’t need to cheat the ageing process and try to live longer by eating healthy food and 

exercising, he argues – 'it’s actually easier, and more beneficial, to expand time from the inside by 

changing the way we experience the moment-to-moment reality of our lives'. 

Steve Taylor is a lecturer in the personal development section of the Centre for Continuing Education 

at the University of Manchester and also works at Salford College as a specialist in specific learning 

difficulties. Over the past three years, he has run courses on the psychology of time perception at the 

university, as well as giving lectures and talks on the subject at other venues. His previous book, THE 

FALL, was published in November 2005 by O Books. 

UK Publisher Icon 




Agent PT 


84

THE FORSAKEN 

Tim Tzouladis 


Non-fiction 

THE FORSAKEN tells the story of the tens of thousands of Americans who emigrated to Russia in the 

1930s and then vanished, threaded around the gruelling experiences of the only two members of the 

American Baseball Team of Gorky Park who survived the gulags. 

It starts with a photograph of a baseball team. Since the year is 1936, the photograph is in black and 

white: two rows of young men, one standing, the other crouching with their arms around each other’s 

shoulders. 

They look just like any other baseball team except, perhaps, for the Russian lettering on their 

uniforms. They are the American Baseball Team of the People’s Recreation Park at Gorky, Moscow, 

most of whom will be dead within the next 18 months. They will not die in an accident, in a train or a 

plane crash. They will be murdered, one by one. 

The two who survive will be inordinately lucky. They will come so close to death in such terrible 

circumstances that, at times, they may even have wished they had died with the rest of the team. 

Firmly in line with the market’s mood, THE FORSAKEN is character-driven history, written from the 

ground up, and should therefore be bought by readers of all backgrounds and interests. 

Tim Tzouladis is a British documentary maker whose surname descends from Crimean Greeks with 

large business interests in Russia. Hence his familial connection to this story: his great-grandfather 

once employed the young Stalin as a factory-worker in Georgia; and his grandfather, who practised in 

Athens, was the doctor who slowly nursed back to health the few Greeks of Jewish origin who 

survived the Nazi concentration camps. As such Tim’s was a family in which one grew up with a close 

sense of the horrors of both the Russian gulags and the Jewish holocaust. He discovered this story 

while researching a film on the gulags, and took a year’s sabbatical to research it. 


US Publisher Penguin 





Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, France (Jean-Claude Lattes), Germany (Karl Blessing), 

Greece (Patakis), Spain (Emece/Grupo Planeta), Sweden (Walstrom & Widstrand) 

85


Non-fiction 

IN THE BEAT OF A HEART 

Life, Energy and the Unity of Nature 

John Whitfield 

This is a book about one of the few big ideas to have emerged in many years... IN THE BEAT OF A HEART 

achieves the rare trick of entertaining and illuminating at the same time 

– Philip Ball, author of CRITICAL MASS 

A strange and wonderful trip into the scientific frontier of nature 

– J. Whitfield Gibbons, Professor of Ecology, University of Georgia 

For centuries, scientists have dreamt of discovering an underlying unity to nature. Science now offers 

powerful explanations for both the dazzling diversity and the striking patterns seen in the living world. 

� Why does every mammal's heart beat one billion times in its life? 

� What can you learn from painting stripes on a cow? 

� Why do we have fisheries, but not birderies? 

� How much LSD should you give to an elephant? 

� Why are there more species in the tropics than at the poles? 

� Why is an American woman like a 30-tonne gorilla? 

The answers to all these questions have to do with energy. Understanding how life uses energy – 

understanding metabolism, in other words – has vexed scientists for over 100 years. Now, some of 

them think they have cracked it. What’s more, they think that their theory can explain how the natural 

world – from the tiniest bacterium to the greatest rain forest – is constructed. 

Biology has been the science of describing and classifying. But a maverick strand of the discipline has 

long sought laws that are like the laws of physics: simple, general, powerful and mathematical. And 

they have done some rather strange things in the process. IN THE BEAT OF A HEART combines 

biography, history, science and nature writing to tell this story. It captures the exciting advances – 

and the people who are making them – that are triggering a revolution as potentially important to 

biology as Newton’s findings were to physics. 

John Whitfield is a London-based science writer. After three years covering evolution, ecology and 

conservation for the journal Nature, his work now appears in numerous prestigious publications 

including Science, Discover, New Scientist, London Review of Books, Financial Times, Sunday Times, 

Independent on Sunday and BBC Wildlife Magazine. He holds a PhD in insect evolution from the 

University of Cambridge and plays in one of the world’s leading gamelan orchestras. IN THE BEAT OF 

A HEART is his first book. 

US Publisher Joseph Henry Press 

US Publication November 2006 

Status Proofs 


Agent PT 

All rights available excluding world English (Joseph Henry Press) 

86

DECENCY AND DISORDER 

The Age of Cant, 1789-1837 

Ben Wilson 

Praise for THE LAUGHTER OF TRIUMPH 

The best history book of the year 

– SCOTSMAN 


Non-fiction 

We all see the Victorians as a respectable, well-mannered and sober people, on the outside at least. 

Yet a generation before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the British were notorious for their 

boisterous pastimes, plain-speaking and drunkenness. They were lightly policed, if at all, and a fair 

amount of disorder was tolerated as the price a country had to pay for its liberty. They detested 

meddling busybodies and revelled in their gregarious popular culture. 

But from the beginning of the century people sensed that things were changing. How was it that this 

free-spirited and pleasure-loving people embraced the kinds of values that we know as Victorian 

moralism? 

Many people – most famously Byron – realised that the British were changing. But they weren’t 

becoming more moral: they were becoming censorious and hypocritical. In the modern age of 

industry and machines, everything was becoming artificial and false, people included. Some clung on 

to the old customs and ways of life in the midst of rapid progress, fearing that Britons in the 

nineteenth-century would become consummate hypocrites who played the part of virtue only in the 

pursuit of gain and imposed their false values on those that dissented. Byron called it the age of 

marble, because it was cold and polished. 

Decency and Disorder is about the generation who grew up during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars 

and who lived to see more stable and prosperous days in the middle of the 19th century. Ben Wilson 

recreates their age, when ideas of progress and propriety jostled with older notions of what it was to 

be British. He examines their world: popular culture and sports, quack doctors, high-society scandals, 

dandies, the criminal underworld, philanthropic do-gooders, playboy actors, religious reformers, 

Byronic rebels and middle-class conformists. From an age of revolution, licentiousness and anxiety 

came one of prosperity, empire and strict morality. 

Today, when anti-social behaviour is a prominent political issue, people pine for lost values, and 

religious morality is re-establishing itself around the world, there are eerie parallels with the age of 

Decency and Disorder. 

Ben Wilson was a foundation scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and graduated with a firstclass 

degree and college prize. He gained an MPhil in historical studies with a thesis entitled ‘Satirical 

Journalism in London, 1815–1825’. His forthcoming book, THE AGE OF CANT, explains how the 

debauched late English eighteenth century became the Victorian era in the space of forty years. 


US Publisher Penguin Press 



Agent CBC 


87

LIBERTY 

Ben Wilson 


Non-fiction 

‘Liberty’ is a word that we hear every day as governments seek new expedients to fight the war on 

terror, the war on identity fraud, the war on anti-social behaviour, and wars on everything else that 

threatens us in the twenty-first century. According to liberal politicians, journalists and lobby groups, 

the modern state is increasingly authoritarian and forgetful of the traditions of civil liberties. 

Governments answer by saying that the necessities of the present call upon responses unique to the 

times in which we live, and that old-fashioned notions of liberty are unhelpful in their struggle against 

the enormities of terrorism. 

But what do we mean when we use ‘liberty’ in such debates? In this book, Ben Wilson charts in the 

history of liberty through British, American and European history – the circumstances in which it was 

fought for, its changing meanings, and, most importantly, how far its history is relevant to the 

problems facing societies today. 

Throughout history, constitutions and laws have been framed on the premise that security must be 

balanced with liberty. Indeed, the very meaning of liberty has emerged out of episodic crises 

throughout history. In other words, it was not worked out in moments of calm and tranquillity, but in 

the heat of threats to the nation state. Today we face similar challenges, but what is missing now is a 

robust definition of liberty – the greatest benefit, surely, of Western civilization. Debates on these 

matters are becoming dangerously polarised, as if liberty and security are irreconcilable. Ministers 

speak of civil liberties as somehow stumbling-blocks to good government; their critics react to every 

new measure as if it is an encroachment on the rights of the individual. History shows that this need 

not be the case. 

Liberty, as it has been worked out through the centuries, is not an easy thing to understand. It is a 

convention – rather than an innate right – which exists only when there is common agreement as to 

what it means. Try to define it in the abstract, and you are left floundering in confusion and 

misunderstanding. The greatest politicians and philosophers have only been able to make sense of it 

within its historical context. It is only then that we can hope to understand what it is, how it can be 

abused and how mistakes can be avoided in the future. 

In this book, Ben Wilson uses the history of Western societies to refine and clarify the meaning of 

liberty, and how our present debates can be enriched by a clearer understanding of both our 

ancestors’ follies and bravery. 

Ben Wilson was a foundation scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and graduated with a firstclass 

degree and college prize. He gained an MPhil in historical studies with a thesis entitled ‘Satirical 

Journalism in London, 1815–1825’. His forthcoming book, THE AGE OF CANT, explains how the 

debauched late English eighteenth century became the Victorian era in the space of forty years. 





Agent CBC 


88


Non-fiction 

QUIRKOLOGY 

The Curious Science of Everyday Lives 

Richard Wiseman 

Whilst his colleagues were beavering away trying to figure out how our eyes detect the edge of 

objects, or how grammar is represented in the brain, Richard Wiseman was busy examining 

something very different – the science of personality. You might have wondered why incompetent 

politicians win elections, what the secret ingredients of charisma are, how our personalities are 

shaped by when we are born, or why people miss the obvious signs of their partner’s infidelity. 

On the surface, these investigations may appear diverse. However, they are all examples of a 

particular approach to understanding human behaviour – ‘quirkology’ if you like. It is an approach 

that involves wading through the backwaters of the human mind and exploring the places where 

mainstream scientists fear to tread. Using scientific methods to investigate offbeat topics that interest 

both the general public and the scientific community. Studying highly peculiar psychological 

phenomena that have important implications. It is about research that makes you laugh, and then 

makes you think. 

This book details Richard's adventures in quirkology, and pays homage to similar research carried out 

by the small band of dedicated academics who have kept the quirky flag flying over the past one 

hundred years 

So, as Richard says, 'Let the quirkology begin...' 

Richard Wiseman is the most cited psychologist now working in Britain. For 12 years he has run the 

Research Unit at The University of Hertfordshire, and in 2002 he was appointed the country’s first 

Professor in the Public Understanding of Psychology. More than anything, Richard has become wellknown 

for researching the areas that other psychologists ignore – investigating whether falling in love 

disrupts your sense of time, for instance, or how honest people are when given the wrong change in 

supermarkets. Now 39, he’s whip-smart, and brilliantly connected in the media. Google Richard’s 

name and you’ll find some 22,000 mentions of his work... alongside which, he has also developed a 

career lecturing to business groups. On the book front, he has written two hugely successful self-help 

titles – THE LUCK FACTOR and DID YOU SPOT THE GORILLA? – which have sold in 27 languages. 


US Publisher Basic Books 





Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Brazil (Record), Germany (Fischer), Israel (Matar), Italy 

(RCS), Korea (Woongjing Think Big), Netherlands (AW Bruna) 

89


Non-fiction 

ONE IN THREE 

A Son's Journey into the History and Science of Cancer 

Adam Wishart 

In hospital, as Dad became more ill, his interests were no longer the realities of his health and treatment. Rather 

he had a paranoid concern that his grand-daughter no longer wished him to read bedtime stories to her. Again 

and again he mentioned it. That he had become so worried over such a small thing, we thought, was a sign that 

his mind was drifting from us, or perhaps that he was desperate to clutch a single experience that he was leaving 

behind. So Jessica was persuaded and Dad sat on his hospital bed in his pyjamas and dressing gown, with one 

hand holding the book and the other around his grand-daughter. Though he could barely gather the strength to 

stop The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from shaking, he battled through its closing chapters, whilst Jessica 

swung her legs backwards and forwards 

– Extract from ONE IN THREE 

When Adam Wishart’s father was diagnosed with cancer, the author couldn’t find any book that 

answered his questions. What was the disease and how did it take hold? What is it about cancer’s 

biology that means it has not been eradicated? How close are we, really, to a cure? There was no 

such book. So he wrote it. This book interweaves two powerful stories: of his father’s personal 

experience, and of the two-hundred-year search for a cure. As treatments become increasingly 

effective, within twenty-five years many cancers will be illnesses that we live with, rather than die 

from, and this is a story of that hope. 

A third of us will develop cancer – this book will help people understand it without blind terror. 

Adam Wishart is an award-winning television documentary director who worked on Tomorrow’s 

World and Horizon. His first book LEAVING REALITY BEHIND was described by the Financial Times as 

‘absorbing as a well-crafted thriller’. He is 38. 

UK Publisher Profile 

US Publisher Grove Atlantic 

UK Publication 22 June 2006 



Agent PW 

All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Finland (Tammi) 

90


Non-fiction 

THE FLORAL REVOLUTION 

The Birth of the Modern Garden in the Eighteenth Century 

Andrea Wulf 

When Andrea Wulf got her first small London garden, she didn’t know much about gardening. But 

when she discovered the hidden stories behind the flowers, she became hooked. These plants 

revealed tales of a group of men that had created a flower revolution in the eighteenth century and 

thereby laid the foundation of our gardens today – just as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine paved 

the way for modern democracy in the eighteenth century. 

These plant hunters, botanists, nurserymen and gardeners observed nature and experimented with 

plants, thereby casting aside myth and superstition which had reigned in the garden for centuries. 

Over the course of the eighteenth century as England became an Empire, they brought seven 

thousand new species to the nation’s gardens, they ordered and re-named all plants to create one 

international standard still is in use today and they brought botany and horticulture into the lives of 

the middle classes. 

THE FLORAL REVOLUTION is a group biography of the founding brothers of the modern garden. It is 

a tale of adventure, competition and commerce as well as science, reason and obsession. It also is the 

story of friendships that overcame class differences and national boundaries through a shared love for 

plants. 

As the nineteenth century dawned the possession of a garden came to be seen as an essential prerequisite 

for happiness – and perhaps Englishness itself. And as the tendrils of the garden revolution 

stretched ever outwards, Anglomania swept through the Western world. Gardeners from Poland to 

Italy, from Sweden to Germany, from Russia to France and as far as America recreated ‘le jardin 

anglais’, ‘der Englische Garten’ or ‘il giardino inglese’. England had become the garden of the world. 

Andrea Wulf trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. Her first book, THIS OTHER 

EDEN: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History, co-authored with Emma Gieben-Gamel, 

was published by Little, Brown in 2005. THE FLORAL REVOLUTION is her second book. 

UK Publisher Heinemann/Random House 





Agent PW 


91

FROM THE BRAIN ONLY 

A Portrait of the Soul 

Adam Zeman 


Non-fiction 

A book that does for the brain what Matt Ridley did for the genome 

Following in the tradition of A. R. Luria’s THE MAN WITH THE SHATTERED WORLD and Oliver Sacks’s 

THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT, FROM THE BRAIN ONLY looks set to become a 

classic on the brain, mind and human condition. 

By combining case histories from his own clinical practice with the latest research findings, Adam 

Zeman works gradually from the atom to the mind, passing through the main constituents of the 

brain, including its genes, proteins, neuronal networks and lobes – and in doing so provides a truly 

literate, engrossing and intelligent tour of modern neuroscience. Each chapter looks at a different 

layer of our brain’s concealed complexity, showing how it is laid bare by neurological disorders ranging 

from the familiar such as memory loss, migraine, chronic fatigue and stroke to the unfamiliar such as 

compulsive fidgeting, CJD, narcolepsy and excessive déjà vu. 

Grounded in science, philosophy and clinical psychology and drawing on fiction to recreate seminal 

historical events, FROM THE BRAIN ONLY uniquely connects the third-person scientific view with the 

evocation of experience that arises from the brain. 

Adam Zeman is professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology at the Peninsula Medical School in 

Exeter, UK. He trained in Oxford, London and Cambridge. His previous book CONSCIOUSNESS: A 

User’s Guide (Yale University Press, 2003) was widely and well reviewed (‘An articulate liberally 

educated neurologist… his treatment of the disorders of knowledge is superb… approachable and 

instructive’, William H. Calvin, The New York Times; ‘Zeman is uniquely qualified to write this book… 

you get a concrete sense of patients with real brain problems… Few authors with have the nerve to 

try to explain so much in so little space’, John Searle, Los Angeles Times Book Review). Besides 

writing widely in medical and scientific journals, Adam has been a regular contributor to the London 

Times and has written occasionally for Prospect, the Scotsman and The New York Times. 

UK Publisher Yale University Press 




Agent PT 

All rights available excluding world English (Yale University Press) 

92

INDEX 

Author Index 


Index 

Anil Ananthaswamy TO THE EDGE OF REASON 32 

Francesca Beauman EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK 33 

Francesca Beauman SHAPELY ANKLE PREFERRED 34 

Belle de Jour FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BELLE DE JOUR, THE 35 

Marcus Berkmann PRINCE OF WALES (HIGHGATE) QUIZ BOOK, THE 36 

Tess Berry Hart GENOPOLIS 4 

Sarah Bilston BED REST 5 

Piers Bizony MAN WHO RAN THE MOON, THE 37 

Neil Boorman BONFIRE OF THE BRANDS 38 

Ken Bray HOW TO SCORE 39 

Michael Brooks THIRTEEN THINGS THAT DON’T MAKE SENSE 40 

Bruna Surfistinha SCORPION'S SWEET VENOM, THE 41 

Alex Butterworth LOST LIBRARIES OF THE RENAISSANCE 42 

Alex Butterworth WORLD THAT NEVER WAS, THE 43 

Michael Bywater LIKE BROTHERS 44 

Warwick Cairns ABOUT THE SIZE OF IT 45 

John Carbone GOOD GUY, THE 6 

Rita Carter CROWDED MIND 46 

Stuart Clark SUN KINGS, THE 47 

Matthew Cobb EGG AND SPERM RACE, THE 48 

Michael Cordy SOURCE, THE 7 

Lewis Crofts PORNOGRAPHER OF VIENNA, THE 8 

Mike Dash SATAN'S CIRCUS 49 

Tom Dewe Matthews OUT OF HOLLYWOOD 50 

Donna Dickenson BODY SHOPPING 51 

Ben Donald DRIVING OVER BRATWURST 52 

Matt Dunn EX-BOYFRIEND'S HANDBOOK, THE 9 

Kevin Dutton EXTREME PERSUASION 53 

Thomas Fink MAN'S BOOK, THE 54 

Saul Frampton WHEN I AM PLAYING WITH MY CAT, HOW DO I KNOW… 55 

Katy Gardner HIDDEN 10 

Christine Garwood FLAT EARTH 56 

John Geiger EXTRA MAN, THE 57 

Misha Glenny MCMAFIA 58 

Salena Godden SPRINGFIELD ROAD 59 

Colin Grant NEGRO WITH A HAT 60 

Sarah Hall BOTTLES 11 

Sarah Hall CARHULLAN ARMY 12 

Alastair Hazell DOCTOR OF ZANZIBAR, THE 61 

Dermot Healy CHILDSBOOK 13 

Michael Hodges KALASH! 62 

James Holland VERITY SERIES, THE 14 

James Holland ITALY'S SORROW 63 

Tom Holland FORGE OF CHRISTENDOM, THE 64 

Carl Honoré KRONOS GENERATION, THE 65 

Sebastian Horsley DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD 66 

93


Index 

Brett Kahr SEX AND THE PSYCHE 67 

Richard T. Kelly CRUSADERS 15 

Daren King MOUSE NOSES ON TOAST 16 

Paul Kingsnorth REAL ENGLAND 68 

Manjit Kumar QUANTUM 69 

Peter Lamont FIRST PSYCHIC, THE 70 

P.J. Lynch CHRISTMAS CAROL, A 17 

Celia Lyttleton SCENT TRAIL, THE 71 

Hector Macdonald STORM PROPHET, THE 18 

Andrew G. Marshall I LOVE YOU BUT I'M NOT IN LOVE WITH YOU 72 

Alan Maryon Davis BEING WELL 73 

Paul Mason LIVE WORKING OR DIE FIGHTING 74 

Hisham Matar IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN 19 

Robert Mighall SUNSHINE 75 

Arthur I. Miller DECIPHERING 137 76 

Arthur I. Miller EMPIRE OF THE STARS 77 

Wendy Moore WEDLOCK 78 

Joshua Mowl OPERATION TYPHOON SHORE 20 

Russell Myrie DON’T RHYME FOR THE SAKE OF RIDDLIN’ 79 

John Naish ENOUGH! 80 

Peadar O'Guilin INFERIOR, THE 21 

Ruth Padel HAMDRYAD 22 

DBC Pierre LUDMILA'S BROKEN ENGLISH 23 

DBC Pierre VERNON GOD LITTLE 24 

Gavin Pretor-Pinney CLOUDSPOTTER'S GUIDE, THE 81 

Gavin Pretor-Pinney WAVES 82 

Candace Robb GUILT OF INNOCENTS, THE 25 

Brian Schofield SELLING YOUR FATHER'S BONES 83 

Nicky Singer GEMX 26 

Steve Taylor TIME UNLIMITED 84 

Tim Tzouladis FORSAKEN, THE 85 

Steve Voake STARLIGHT CONSPIRACY, THE 27 

Mark Watson LIGHT-HEARTED LOOK AT MURDER, A 28 

John Whitfield IN THE BEAT OF A HEART 86 

Ben Wilson DECENCY AND DISORDER 87 

Ben Wilson LIBERTY 88 

Richard Wiseman QUIRKOLOGY 89 

Adam Wishart ONE IN THREE 90 

Tod Wodicka ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL… 29 

Isabel Wolff FORGET-ME-NOT 30 

Andrea Wulf FLORAL REVOLUTION, THE 91 

Adam Zeman FROM THE BRAIN ONLY 92 

94

Title Index 


Index 

ABOUT THE SIZE OF IT Warwick Cairns 45 

ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL… Tod Wodicka 29 

BED REST Sarah Bilston 5 

BEING WELL Alan Maryon Davis 73 

BODY SHOPPING Donna Dickenson 51 

BONFIRE OF THE BRANDS Neil Boorman 38 

BOTTLES Sarah Hall 11 

CARHULLAN ARMY Sarah Hall 12 

CHILDSBOOK Dermot Healy 13 

CHRISTMAS CAROL, A P.J. Lynch 17 

CLOUDSPOTTER'S GUIDE, THE Gavin Pretor-Pinney 81 

CROWDED MIND Rita Carter 46 

CRUSADERS Richard T. Kelly 15 

DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD Sebastian Horsley 66 

DECENCY AND DISORDER Ben Wilson 87 

DECIPHERING 137 Arthur I. Miller 76 

DOCTOR OF ZANZIBAR, THE Alastair Hazell 61 

DON’T RHYME FOR THE SAKE OF RIDDLIN’ Russell Myrie 79 

DRIVING OVER BRATWURST Ben Donald 52 

EGG AND SPERM RACE, THE Matthew Cobb 48 

EMPIRE OF THE STARS Arthur I. Miller 77 

ENOUGH! John Naish 80 

EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK Francesca Beauman 33 

EX-BOYFRIEND'S HANDBOOK, THE Matt Dunn 9 

EXTRA MAN, THE John Geiger 57 

EXTREME PERSUASION Kevin Dutton 53 

FIRST PSYCHIC, THE Peter Lamont 70 

FLAT EARTH Christine Garwood 56 

FLORAL REVOLUTION, THE Andrea Wulf 91 

FORGE OF CHRISTENDOM, THE Tom Holland 64 

FORGET-ME-NOT Isabel Wolff 30 

FORSAKEN, THE Tim Tzouladis 85 

FROM THE BRAIN ONLY Adam Zeman 92 

FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BELLE DE JOUR, THE Belle de Jour 35 

GEMX Nicky Singer 26 

GENOPOLIS Tess Berry Hart 4 

GOOD GUY, THE John Carbone 6 

GUILT OF INNOCENTS, THE Candace Robb 25 

HAMDRYAD Ruth Padel 22 

HIDDEN Katy Gardner 10 

HOW TO SCORE Ken Bray 39 

I LOVE YOU BUT I'M NOT IN LOVE WITH YOU Andrew G. Marshall 72 

IN THE BEAT OF A HEART John Whitfield 86 

IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN Hisham Matar 19 

INFERIOR, THE Peadar O'Guilin 21 

ITALY'S SORROW James Holland 63 

KALASH! Michael Hodges 62 

95


Index 

KRONOS GENERATION, THE Carl Honoré 65 

LIBERTY Ben Wilson 88 

LIGHT-HEARTED LOOK AT MURDER, A Mark Watson 28 

LIKE BROTHERS Michael Bywater 44 

LIVE WORKING OR DIE FIGHTING Paul Mason 74 

LOST LIBRARIES OF THE RENAISSANCE Alex Butterworth 42 

LUDMILA'S BROKEN ENGLISH DBC Pierre 23 

MAN WHO RAN THE MOON, THE Piers Bizony 37 

MAN'S BOOK, THE Thomas Fink 54 

MCMAFIA Misha Glenny 58 

MIRROR MIRROR Maria Alvarez 3 

MOUSE NOSES ON TOAST Daren King 16 

NEGRO WITH A HAT Colin Grant 60 

ONE IN THREE Adam Wishart 90 

OPERATION TYPHOON SHORE Joshua Mowl 20 

OUT OF HOLLYWOOD Tom Dewe Matthews 50 

PORNOGRAPHER OF VIENNA, THE Lewis Crofts 8 

PRINCE OF WALES (HIGHGATE) QUIZ BOOK, THE Marcus Berkmann 36 

QUANTUM Manjit Kumar 69 

QUIRKOLOGY Richard Wiseman 89 

REAL ENGLAND Paul Kingsnorth 68 

SATAN'S CIRCUS Mike Dash 49 

SCENT TRAIL, THE Celia Lyttleton 71 

SCORPION'S SWEET VENOM, THE Bruna Surfistinha 41 

SELLING YOUR FATHER'S BONES Brian Schofield 83 

SEX AND THE PSYCHE Brett Kahr 67 

SHAPELY ANKLE PREFERRED Francesca Beauman 34 

SOURCE, THE 

SPRINGFIELD ROAD 

Michael Cordy 

Salena Godden 

7 

59 

STARLIGHT CONSPIRACY, THE Steve Voake 27 

STORM PROPHET, THE Hector Macdonald 18 

SUN KINGS, THE Stuart Clark 47 

SUNSHINE Robert Mighall 75 

THIRTEEN THINGS THAT DON’T MAKE SENSE Michael Brooks 40 

TIME UNLIMITED Steve Taylor 84 

TO THE EDGE OF REASON Anil Ananthaswamy 32 

VERITY SERIES, THE James Holland 14 

VERNON GOD LITTLE DBC Pierre 24 

WAVES Gavin Pretor-Pinney 82 

WEDLOCK Wendy Moore 78 

WHEN I AM PLAYING WITH MY CAT, HOW DO I KNOW… Saul Frampton 55 

WORLD THAT NEVER WAS, THE Alex Butterworth 43 

96

Conville & Walsh Ltd

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