Fiction
Katri Skala
A Perfect Mother
‘Ms Skala conveys the shadowed charm of these story-haunted stones. Her Trieste is never an abstraction, but it becomes a potent metaphor for the mask of beauty that violence may wear.’ The Economist
A bracing, hypnotic story of midlife crisis about the complexities of love, relationship and legacy.
A Perfect Mother asks big questions: What do we inherit from the broken histories of our parents and our grandparents and how does this shape our own sense of identity? Can we ever escape the past? Are the stories, the ones we are told and the ones we tell, integral to how we know each other and how we love? What does it mean to be a good parent, let alone a perfect mother?
‘A truly impressive first novel … Atmospheric, fascinating and very moving. I highly recommend it.’
Christina Patterson, columnist, broadcaster and author of The Art of Not Falling Apart
Genre: Thriller / Literary Fiction
Extent: 220 pp
Dimensions: 216 x 138mm
Original Printing: HB, UK only
Rights Available: Worldwide HB & PB. Significant potential for US sales and European translations.
Translation: The work, which is partly set in Trieste would be especially suited to translations into Italian, French, German. The book was featured in Il Piccolo as a desirable book for translation into Italian.
Film Rights: This is a highly cinematic thriller – full of intense drama and hauntingly atmospheric.
Gregory Warren Wilson
Twenty-Five Fables
The twenty-five fables gathered together here rethink the conventions of the genre. In so doing they give voice to animals as various and improbable as a goose who wants to swap legs with a giraffe, an impudent cockroach with no time for deference, and a camel so exasperated by the constraints of the genre that he ends up stalking off the page.
Two design elements are interleaved throughout: twenty-five dingbats designed by Giambattista Bodoni – devices intended to be used decoratively by printers – together with Thomas Bewick’s celebrated woodblock prints, which inspired several of these new fables.
But the characters in these fables have been given access to unprecedented realms – both geographically and metaphorically. The outcome is a collection that embraces a pair of cross-dressing vultures, an eccentric elk with a contemplative vocation, and a clutch of spoonbill eggs being incubated by a duck-billed platypus..
Genre: Illustrated Fiction / Gift Book / Children’s Fable
Dimensions: 210 x 148 mm
Original Printing: HB signed limited edition, UK only
Extent: 190 pp
Rights Available: Worldwide / HB & PB
Audience: These amusing and intelligent fables are charmingly transgressive and universally appealing. The work is exceptionally beautifully designed. As such it would make a commercially strong and highly desirable gift book.