LBF Books on the Move
While we shared a healthy dose of breaking deal news from the show floor in London, a number of titles we mentioned—and some we didn’t—have not sold in the States. We’ll be covering books that cropped up at London for weeks to come, but here are a few projects that got some heat during the fair which have yet to find U.S. buyers. In a dispatch from the LBF, we wrote about the new thriller series the Salomonsson Agency has been shopping by Anders de la Motte. The series, which is already out in Sweden, has been acquired in a number of other countries, and a U.K. auction was underway at the fair. Also drawing interest in London was a novel featuring trolls that Faber (in the U.K.) acquired off of a partial manuscript; the Bonnier Group Agency represents the title, and the author is Swedish, but that’s all we know right now. British agent David Godwin is also shopping a dystopian series called Bone Season that had people talking. Godwin confirmed scant details about the books—we heard the author was 20 years old—and would only say no deals have closed yet.

Seal Press Nabs Memoir
Agent Rita Rosenkranz sold North American rights to a self-published memoir called Replacement Child to Brooke Warner at Seal Press. The book, scheduled for spring 2013, was published by author Judy L. Mandel in 2009, and it hit B&N’s bestseller list for memoir in September 2011. Rosenkranz found the title through that list. The book is about the author coming to terms with the fact that she was conceived to fill the void left by the death of her sister. (Mandel’s sister died when a plane hit her family’s house, setting the place ablaze.) Seal Press said the book “not only unveils this often overlooked psychological syndrome and overcoming its negative impact, but also delves deeply into the nature of grief when parents lose a child.”

McMullan’s ‘China’... for Kids
James McMullan, a well-regarded illustrator who also serves as the principal poster artist for Lincoln Center Theater, sold a children’s book called Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood to Elise Howard at Algonquin Books. Holly McGhee at Pippin Properties handled the world rights deal. In the book McMullan, who was born in China after his Irish grandparents (who were missionaries) settled in the country, recounts his childhood years leading up to the start of WWII. McMullan, whose picture books include I Stink and I’m Dirty, will tell the story through 52 paintings, each of which will be a watercolor. McGhee said the book provides “a unique window into his early inspirations, from color and light to architecture, geography, and family politics.”

Entrekin Gets Seditious
Morgan Entrekin and Jamison Stoltz, at Grove/Atlantic, took North American rights to a book by Charles Slack about the Sedition Act of 1798. Agent Andrew Blauner, of Blauner Books Literary, brokered the deal for Slack, whose last book, Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America’s First Female Tycoon, was published by Ecco in 2004. The Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed in the United States in the period right after the French Revolution. As events in France were igniting passions in the U.S. and there was mounting fear that some states might try to secede from the union, the bills were intended to give more power to the federal government. (The Sedition Act, for example, made it a crime to publish writing that was deemed as a malicious attack against Congress or the president.) Blauner said the book “tells the story of the men arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights, and of the zealots who prosecuted them, in the first great test of liberty following the adoption of the Bill of Rights.”