Christine Higdon’s debut novel The Very Marrow of Our Bones is off to a great start. Kirkus calls it, “an ambitious debut novel that will make you cry, cringe, and laugh.” And in an interview with Higdon, Open Book called the novel “a deeply compelling story of secrets, ambitions, identity, and loss, told with insight and honesty and laced with bright moments of hope and humour.” The Very Marrow of Our Bones has also been reviewed in Toronto Star, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist.
The most recent book in Steve Burrows’ Birder Murder Mystery Series, A Shimmer of Hummingbirds, received a starred review in Kirkus! “Skillfully written, full of moral ambiguities and artful puzzles, with a spine-tingling final sentence.” Click here to read the full review.
Two years ago Doug Pepper at Signal/McClelland & Stewart acquired Canadian rights to co-authors of The Big Shift Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s EMPTY PLANET: The Shock of Global Population Decline from John Pearce at Westwood Creative Artists. The book was researched on six continents and predicts a surprising decline in the world’s population with major consequences for individual countries and for the planet as a whole, US rights have been sold to Emma Berry at Crown/Penguin Random House by John Pearce; UK & Commonwealth excluding Canada rights have been sold to Tom Asker at Robinson/Piatkus, Constable & Robinson/Little, Brown; Chinese rights to Beijing Huazhong; Japanese rights to Bungeishunju; and Korean rights to Eulyoo,. The UK and foreign sales were made by Carolyn Forde on behalf of John Pearce at Westwood Creative Artists. EMPTY PLANET will be published simultaneously in Canada, the US and the UK, in February 2019.
Eat This! How Fast Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (And How to Fight Back), Andrea Curtis’ follow-up to her bestselling book, What’s For Lunch?, has received starred reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal.
Congratulations to Joel Thomas Hynes whose novel, We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, won the 2017 BMO Winterset Award!
The Award, which celebrates excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador writing, is composed of a partnership between the BMO Financial Group, ArtsNL, and the project’s founder, writer Richard Gwyn.
Lara Hinchberger of Penguin Canada has acquired, in a two book deal, Canadian English rights to internationally bestselling women’s fiction author Karma Brown’s (Come Away With Me, The Choices We Make, In This Moment) first foray into the domestic noir genre; RECIPE FOR A PERFECT WIFE. In which a reluctant, modern housewife, Alice, finds a cookbook buried in an old box in the basement of her new home and becomes captivated with the cookbook’s previous owner, a 1950s housewife, Nellie. Dissatisfied with her own life and losing her grip on reality one retro recipe at a time, Alice will decide—thanks to Nellie’s cookbook, the old house, and decades-long held secrets— how far she’s willing to go to get the life she wants. Penguin will publish RECIPE FOR A PERFECT WIFE as a Viking title in February 2019. The deal was arranged by Carolyn Forde at Westwood Creative Artists.
Editor-in-Chief of McClelland & Stewart and Doubleday Canada Martha Kanya-Forstner has acquired Canadian rights to two-time Giller Prize-winner M.G. Vassanji’s new novel, tentatively titled A DELHI OBSESSION, and a collection of short stories tentatively titled WHAT ARE YOU. A DELHI OBSESSION, brimming with emotional tension, tells the stories of Munir Khan and Mohini Singh as they begin a fraught, torrid affair despite their moral and political differences. Publication of the novel is planned for fall 2019. Bruce Westwood of Westwood Creative Artists arranged the deal.
We are thrilled for Mark Sakamoto and his book Forgiveness, winner of the 2018 Canada Reads debates. The book which originally published in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, is in its eighth week on the bestseller list since being nominated. Sakamoto’s recent win has led to renewed interest including coverage in the National Post and Maclean’s.
Congratulations Mark – we are so proud to have you here at Westwood Creative Artists!
Author and photographer Nancy Rose was featured on The Weather Network! Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at how she captures pictures of the cute little critters in her Squirrels book series. Her newest book The Secret Life of Squirrels: Back to School! will be available this summer.
Elaine “Lainey” Lui of CTV’s “The Social” and founder and editor of LaineyGossip.com, personally revealed the cover of Raziel Reid’s YA novel Kens on her namesake blog. Lui, who represented Reid’s first book When Everything Feels Like the Movies on CBC’s Canada Reads 2015, took the opportunity to share her appreciation of his latest work, “This is a story of identity and acceptance and, like all of Raziel’s work, it’s funny and provocative and deeply disturbing… because don’t we all wear masks? Don’t we all borrow faces?”
Kens will be available September 2018.
Congratulations to acclaimed YA author Susan Juby on making the Young Adult Library Services Association’s list of 2018 Best Fiction for Young Adults with her newest title, The Fashion Committee. Since publishing in 2017 the novel has earned positive reviews from Quill & Quire and the Toronto Star, and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Horn Book Magazine, and School Library Journal. The Globe and Mail said, “Like all Juby novels, this one is sparkling verbose and self-deprecating … This one is tailored to perfection for readers who love to laugh and look good doing it.”