Dani Atkins won the Romantic Novelist Association’s Jackie Collins Award for Romantic Thrillers this week for SIX DAYS. It was an Aria triumph all round at the RNA Awards this week, with two Aria authors on the shortlist. Emma Pass was also shortlisted for The Historical Romantic Novel Award for Before The Dawn. 

Aria’s commissioning editor Martina Arzu has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights for two Californian-set novels by author Ella Berman from Anna Carmichael at Abner Stein, on behalf of David Mitchell at InkWell.

Powerful and intoxicatingly gripping, BEFORE WE WERE INNOCENT is a dark escapist exploration of the intense friendships and mistakes of our youth. Head of Zeus will be publishing in July 2023 following the release in the US by Berkley (PRH) in hardback, e-book and audio in April 2023. 

Head of Zeus are delighted to be publishing Swéta Rana’s debut novel, QUEUING FOR THE QUEEN, an uplifting and moving novel about a British Indian mother and daughter and their journey from the Southbank to Westminster across 24 hours to see the Queen lying in state.

Rosie de Courcy acquired World English Language rights for QUEUING FOR THE QUEEN for Head of Zeus from Sara O’Keeffe and Max Edwards, at Aevitas Creative Management. The book will be published in ebook on the 11th of May, and in paperback on the 6th of June 2023.

Journalist Gavin Esler’s Britain is Better Than This: Why a Great Country is Failing Us All has been signed by Head of Zeus.

Publisher Neil Belton acquired world all-language rights from Andrew Gordon at David Higham Associates for publication on 21st September in hardback and e-book.

Head of Zeus has snapped up The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou, an historical crime novel from Eleni Kyriacou, in a two-book deal.

Acquiring editor Peyton Stableford won world all-language rights from Abi Fellows at the Good Literary Agency. The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou will be published on 9th November. 

The longlist for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award was unveiled this week and included Yasmin Cordery Khan’s stunning debut ‘Edgware Road’, a wide-ranging and affecting novel about family and identity, and which was published in hardback in January 2022.

The winner of the award, which is open to any début novel written in English and published in the UK, will receive £2,500 cash. The winning novel will be selected by this year’s guest adjudicator Louisa Young from a shortlist drawn up by a panel of Authors’ Club members, chaired by Lucy Popescu.

Writing Death and the Conjuror was an absolute joy because it was my opportunity to pay tribute to all the classic mysteries I’ve read and admired over the years. I’m a devotee of the Golden Age greats like Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen and Christianna Brand – to name a few. As such, I wanted to play around with some of the key tropes and archetypes of the classic Golden Age Mystery. But at the same time I was keen for the story to remain faithful to the format.

In the early 1990s, and for nearly a decade, I was a civilian contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense, assigned first in Belarus and, later, in Kazakhstan. My job was to assist in the dismantlement of weapons of mass destruction. Overall, the initiative was to eradicate nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western world discovered that the Soviet Union had over 10,000 nuclear weapons and tons of deadly biological and chemical stockpiles.

The inspiration behind the Ericka Blackwood series comes from my nearly three decades as a prosecutor, fifteen of which were dedicated to cybercrime. Simply put, it left me with a lot of stories to tell, my own, those of colleagues, and those of investigators. I worked in this area from the time cybercrime and digital evidence became a thing, a witness to the cat and mouse game as both criminals and the police became ever more technically capable. This left me with thousands of real-life anecdotes to fictionalize and use to build my plot.