Novels Launch Menaker at HC

Editor Daniel Menaker, newly arrived at HarperCollins from Random, will launch his HC list with first and second novels from two promising young writers. From agent Maria Massie at Kim Witherspoon Associates he bought a second novel by Lucinda Rosenfeld, whose What She Saw he had published at Random. It's called, in the same vein, Why She Cared, and will continue the story of the tragicomic Phoebe Fine as she becomes involved with a million-dollar viola and a mysterious conductor. Menaker bought world English rights for what he wryly describes as a "substantially non-minimal six figures." A similar sum went to David McCormick at IMG to preempt a first novel called On This Day by Nathaniel Bellows, who is a poet and painter as well as a former staffer at the New Yorker, Menaker's own alma mater. This is about a young brother and sister coping, in Maine, with the deaths of their parents; the editor took world rights.