Exciting new signing for Harvill Secker Crime Fiction.

HARVILL SECKER SIGN NEW STAR

OF AMERICAN CRIME WRITING

 

In a major acquisition, Alison Hennessey, Senior Crime Editor at Harvill Secker, has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights to two books by Elizabeth Little – an exciting new American voice in crime fiction.  Pre-empted by foreign publishers across the world, Alison Hennessey secured a two-book deal for Harvill Secker with Hal Fessenden at Penguin US. The first book, Dear Daughter, will be one of Harvill Secker’s major titles in early 2015 and will be published simultaneously with Viking in the US.

 

Los Angeles-based Elizabeth Little’s work has appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and she is the author of two non-fiction titles: Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, published in 2007 by Melville House, and Trip of the Tongue: Cross-Country Travels in Search of America’s Languages, published by Bloomsbury in March 2012.

 

Alison Hennessey said: ‘Dear Daughter is everything I’ve been looking for since I started at Harvill Secker – sharp, spiky, clever and enormously fun, with the kind of acerbic narrator that editors (and readers) dream of discovering.  Dear Daughter is like a glorious combination of Gone Girl meets Mean Girls with a twist of Alice la Plante’s award-winning Turn of Mind, but it has a freshness and vitality that’s all its own. Elizabeth Little is a fiction star in the making, and I couldn’t be more pleased that we’ll be publishing her at Harvill Secker.’

 

About Dear Daughter:

After a trial that transfixed America, teenager Janie Jenkins – rich, pretty and far too clever for her own good – was convicted of the murder of her mother, a reclusive philanthropist. Ten years later, Janie has been released on appeal but most of the country remains convinced she’s guilty – and even Janie’s not entirely sure what she did that fateful night. All she has to go on are the last words her mother spoke before she was killed, which send Janie on a mission to an odd little town in the very back of beyond but, with the whole of America’s media on her tail, she has to do everything she can to find out the truth about her mother’s death without revealing her true identity.