Aussie Novel Goes to Putnam

Margo Lipschultz preempted North American rights to J.P. Pomare’s novel In My Skull. The debut is Lipschultz’s first acquisition since joining Putnam. The publisher said the book was pitched as Sharp Objects meets Room; its narrator, a teenage girl, is “being held hostage in a remote cabin in New Zealand” by a captor who “claims he’s protecting her from the tragic aftermath of her terrible role in a night back home in Melbourne she can’t remember.” The truth, the publisher elaborated, “might be far more complicated.” Writers House’s Daniel Lazar handled the sale on behalf of Pippa Mason at Curtis Brown Australia. In Australia, the book was acquired at auction by Hachette.

Hlad Takes ‘Flight’ to Kensington

For his eponymous imprint at Kensington Books, John Scognamiglio took world rights to Alan Hlad’s The Long Flight Home. Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media Group represented the author, saying he pitched the book in the vein of novels like Unbroken and Water for Elephants. It is, he said, a “bittersweet tale of courage, sacrifice, and the tragedy of war” that follows “two people brought together and driven apart by World War II.” Hlad has written for the Bleeding Lion and Larks Fiction magazine.

Hopkins’s YA to McElderry

Ruta Rimas, in an exclusive submission, bought North American rights to Ellen Hopkins’s YA novel Sanctuary Highway. The Margaret K. McElderry Books editor brokered the agreement with agent Laura Rennert at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Rimas said it takes readers into a world in which “things continue to go along the current trajectory politically, and the America of the story is an even darker version of the one we know now.” The book is set for fall 2019.

Roxborough Has ‘Enough’ at Sasquatch

Cookbook author Shauna James Ahern sold an essay collection called Enough to Susan Roxborough at Sasquatch Books. Stacey Glick at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, who represented Ahern, said the book explores “what it means to do enough, have enough, and be enough as a woman, wife, mother, daughter, and friend.” Ahern, who won a James Beard Foundation Award for her cookbook writing and oversees a successful food website, suffered a minor stroke at 49. The experience, Glick explained, sent her on a journey to explore her lifelong feelings of inadequacy and get to a place where she could be happy with “her friends, her rural island town, her husband and children, and the small joyful moments of life.” Roxborough took world rights to the book.

Fader Sells Two to Graydon House

Molly Fader closed a two-book world rights agreement with Susan Swinwood at the Harlequin imprint Graydon House Books. The first title in the agreement, The McAvoy Sisters’ Book of Secrets, is, the publisher said, a “witty and heartfelt story of estranged sisters, grudgingly reunited after their mother’s stroke, who must face the truth about the night that changed all their lives when they were teenagers.” The book is set for spring 2019. Pam Hopkins, an agent with an eponymous shingle, represented Fader, who has written more than 40 novels under the pseudonym Molly O’Keefe.