Elizabeth Strout, who won a Pulitzer Prize for
Olive Kitteridge, sold world rights to
Oh William! to
Andy Ward at Random House. The novel, RH said, is about a formerly married couple who are now friends. They watch their children grow up and reckon with their own pasts as they “unearth the kind of long-buried family secret that rearranges everything we think we know about those closest to us.” Strout was represented by
Molly Friedrich and
Oh William! is slated for October.
Putnam Goes ‘Orange’ for Yoon
Putnam’s
City of Orange by
Frankly in Love and the forthcoming
Version Zero). The adult novel is, Putnam said, an “intimate” tale about “a man who wakes up alone and injured in a postapocalyptic landscape and must find his way home.”
Barrow s Abbey Road Baptist Church gardens to become a community space
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A crazy amount of hope : Imbolo Mbue s new novel of impossible struggles
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Random House: 384 pages, $28
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In Kosawa, the fictional African village at the heart of Imbolo Mbue’s epic new novel, “How Beautiful We Were,” the children die because the land and water have been poisoned by an American oil company. When some parents protest, they vanish, presumably killed for their efforts. Later, others are tortured, hanged or even gunned down in front of their children.
Those who continue to fight for years, even decades, encounter indifference from the corporation, antipathy from the government, tribalism from countrymen and well-intentioned but ineffective help from American activists. Even the magical realism Mbue sprinkles in is no match for the twin forces of domestic corruption and American corporate imperialism.
How Beautiful We Were, for some time.
She began writing it 17 years ago, long before her debut,
Behold the Dreamers, sold to Random House US for a seven-figure advance. She returned to it in 2016, when the US presidential election, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and other alarming news consumed each day.
“I just hid in the story. It brought me so much peace and solace,” Mbue says in an interview. “There were months when I didn’t read the news, didn’t watch any TV. I told my friends, please don’t tell me about what is going on. Everything that I was feeling – the pain, the confusion, the frustration about the state of the country – I looked for ways to channel it so that I could honestly tell the story.”