Harper Buy in Auction from Britain

PW Rights Alert Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 5/11/2001

It's unusual for a publisher here to take part in an auction run by a
British agent, but that's what HarperCollins executive editor Carolyn
Marino did this week, emerging the winner for a first novel set in Ireland
that's been making waves in Europe.

It's "A Temporal Kingdom" by a young English journalist, Jojo Moyes, and it
was part of a two-book North American rights deal, made with Jo Frank at
London's A.P. Watt agency. It's comparable in tone and style, says Marino,
to Maeve Binchy or Rosamunde Pilcher, and she describes Moyes as "a major
new voice."

There was another auction in Britain, won by Hodder, and rights have also
been sold in France, Germany, Italy, Holland and Sweden.