Random House Snags George Saunders’s Next NovelAndy Ward at Random House acquired world rights to
Vigil by
George Saunders from
Esther Newberg at CAA. The Booker Prize winner’s latest novel unfolds on the deathbed of a powerful oil company CEO as he is being ferried from this world to the next and receives worldly and otherworldly visitors who are “clamoring for a reckoning,” per the publisher. Publication is set for January 2026.
Feiwel and Friends Lands Buzzy YA DebutLiz Szabla at Feiwel and Friends bought North American rights, at auction, to
Cathryn Free’s debut YA novel,
Something Bright and Beautiful, from
Sara Shandler at the Book Group. Foreign rights have sold in 10 territories. The publisher called the novel “a romantic coming-of-age story” following Ellie, who, while mourning the death of her teen brother, encounters a mysterious boy on a midnight run and begins to wonder if the cosmos has brought them together. Publication is set for April 2027.
More New Book Deals of NoteAmong this week’s offerings are 2023 Prix Goncourt laureate
Laura Vazquez’s sophomore novel,
Les Forces, billed as a subversion of the queer coming-of-age tale in the story of a girl at odds with the social order;
Jonathan Tepper’s memoir
Shooting Up, chronicling the economist’s childhood in Madrid, where his missionary parents founded a drug rehab center during the height of Spain’s heroin epidemic; and MacDowell and Center for Fiction Susan Kamil fellow
Jared Jackson’s linked story collection Locals, following young, working-class characters navigating love, grief, survival, and the pursuit of something more in the aughts in Hartford, Conn.
The Latest in Children’s and YA DealsNew projects this week include
Change of Plans by YA author
Sarah Dessen, about how a girl who’s always been more comfortable in someone else’s shadow steps into the light when she reconnects with her extended family, makes new friends working at a diner, and falls for the last guy she would have expected;
Lynette Noni’s YA series Shadow Reaper, a dark fantasy romance about a young reaper hunter who must conspire with her childhood friend turned mortal enemy and his crew of illegal magic thieves to stop a plot to steal untold power and doom their world; and
Little Necromancers by debut author
Emma Devlin, a ghostly YA whodunit novel following a young psychic who reluctantly teams up with the strange and hostile ghosts haunting the Granville estate to investigate her friend's murder.
Bestselling YA Author Takes Adult Debut to Morrow
