Deals: Greenlaw Moves to Viking

Viking’s Wendy Wolf has acquired two new nonfiction books by Linda Greenlaw in a world rights deal with Stuart Krichevsky. The first, to be published in summer 2010, marks her return this fall to swordfishing (the career that brought her to the public eye in The Perfect Storm), beginning with her first trip to the Grand Banks in over a decade. In 2011, Greenlaw will return to her roots in Isle au Haut, Maine, in a sequel to her memoir The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island. Greenlaw’s three bestselling books about her life as a commercial fisherman, The Hungry Ocean, The Lobster Chronicles and All Fishermen Are Liars, were all published by Hyperion, as were her two more recently published mystery novels. Greenlaw’s editor at Hyperion, Will Schwalbe, left the company at the beginning of this year.

Weinstein Books editor Richard Florest preempted U.S. rights to John Geiger’s The Third Man Factor: The Secret to Survival in Extreme Environments via Patrick Walsh at Conville & Walsh. The title refers to a phenomenon Geiger has been researching for the past six years, in which people at the very edge of death, often adventurers or explorers, will experience a sense of an incorporeal person beside them who encourages them to make one final effort to survive. Geiger has uncovered hundreds of examples of this occurrence, from a 9/11 survivor to the legendary Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner and shipwrecked French Foreign Legion deserters. Geiger, the author of several previous books, is the editorial board director of the Globe & Mail in Canada. The book, which was originally commissioned by Penguin Canada, will be published there next year, and Weinstein will publish in fall 2009. Last week, U.K. rights went to Canongate at auction and Australian rights were preempted by Text.

Tim Bent at Oxford University Press has signed up the next two books by Paul Collier with a low six-figure offer to Andrew Wylie. The first project, Natural Disorder, will focus on the economic exploitation of the natural environment, commodity booms and the current food crisis. In the second, Exodus, Collier will discuss the issue of international migration. Collier’s most recent book, The Bottom Billion, published by Oxford last year, won the 2008 Arthur Ross Book Award and the Lionel Gelber Prize. The new works are scheduled for publication in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

Nation Books editorial director Carl Bromley has acquired a new work by the celebrated Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: An Almost Universal History; Susan Bergholz sold North American rights. Mirrors is an unofficial history of the world seen—and mirrored to the reader—through the eyes of history’s unseen, unheard and forgotten, and distilled into 600 sections; it is described as Galeano’s most ambitious project since Memory of Fire, his trilogy that recreated 500 years in the Americas. Foreign rights have been sold in Mexico, Brazil, Latin America, Portugal and Spain; Nation Books will publish in June 2009.

Mary Monroe has just signed a new three-book deal with Kensington imprint Dafina; executive editor Selena James bought world rights from Andrew Stuart. Two of the three books will continue Monroe’s bestselling God series; God Don’t Like Ugly, which first introduced her characters Annette and Rhoda, currently has more than 250,000 copies in print. Upcoming titles with Dafina, before those in the new deal, are The Company We Keep in March 2009 and God Ain’t Blind in September 2009.