Debut Novel Draws HM Preempt
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 1/20/2003
A first novel by a former Peace Corps worker who went on to the Iowa Writers Workshop so engrossed Houghton Mifflin's Heidi Pitlor that she stayed up all night reading the manuscript and got Janet Silver to agree the next morning on a substantial six-figure offer for North American rights only. The author is Robert Rosenberg, and his book is Shake the Earth on Which I Stand. It is about a group of people, including a father and daughter from Kyrgyzstan (a former Soviet republic), a U.S. aid worker and a young Apache fleeing his reservation, who meet in Istanbul on the eve of 1999's huge earthquake; it is a study of people caught between old and new worlds, as well as a love story. The agent who shopped the book to a limited group of editors and fielded HM's 24-hours-later offer was Dorian Karchmar at Lowenstein-Yost Associates. Rosenberg served in remote Kyrgyzstan and has also worked on an Indian reservation.
