What Ends, again

Back in 2014, I had a brief sensation of "being on a roll". The US edition of my novel, What Ends, had just been published; I had sold the UK and Commonwealth rights to One World; I was moving to London to start a new job. Heck, it was even a World Cup year. Life was good. Surely my next success as a writer would be just around the corner.

As I've written on this blog before, however, that next success never quite came to pass. For sure, there were smaller victories: manuscripts finished, essays published, agents acquired. I got the odd piece of fan mail every now and then; I got taken out of libraries enough that I collected a very modest cheque from PLR every year. But the next book always seemed just out of reach.

It still feels a little out of reach, some days more than others. I'm still chipping away at new manuscripts, and I feel good about them, and my agent is actively shopping my work around again. (As one of my writing teachers told me many years ago: as long as you have work out on submission, you have hope.) But it's been 11 years now since my novel was published — a quarter of my life — and so it's hard not to feel like I'm spinning my wheels a bit. My US publisher has gone bankrupt; my UK publisher has taken me out of print. I'm still getting the odd PLR cheque, and it's truly humbling to know that people are still borrowing my book from libraries that much, but for most other intents and purposes, I feel more and more like a lapsed author.

Imagine my delight, then, when out of the blue a few months ago I got an enquiry from an Italian publisher: were translation rights available for What Ends?

As it turned out, reader, they very much were, because while my US publisher had bought them back in 2013, when they folded all rights reverted to me. So I replied to said Italian publisher to tell them as much. The rights were available. The rights were mine. What did they have in mind?

I'll spare you the details of the ensuing negotiations, conducted in my faltering Italian because I like to make my life needlessly difficult sometimes. But the upshot is: my novel, after 11 years, is getting a new breath of life. Sometime in the next two years or so, it will be published again, in Italian, and I genuinely couldn't be happier. It's sort of hard to imagine how my bleak, make-believe Hebridean island will land in the Mediterranean, and several people have asked me how they're going to translate the cryptic crossword clues, to which I say: I have no idea.

But I'm excited to find out.