Featured titles
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The Book of Legendary Lands - 2013
Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO
Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New York home of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s orchid-loving fictional detective, runs up against the resistance of fact. Wolfe’s house cannot be identified because Stout “always talked of a brownstone at a certain number on West 35th Street, but in the course of his novels he mentioned at least ten different street numbers – and what is more, there are no brownstones on 35th Street”. Using Eco’s typology, a fiction has been transmuted into a legend: “Legendary lands and places are of various kinds and have only one characteristic in common: whether they depend on ancient legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time or whether they are in effect a modern invention, they have created flows of belief.” (from John Gray's review on English-language edition, full text http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/11/no-place-home)
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THE LYING YEAR, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov
Rights sold: Bulgaria - ENTHUSIAST, France - ACTES SUD, Russia - OGI, Slovenia - Modrijan, World English - AMAZON CROSSING
Could have been the blown business deal with the Italians. Could have been the unauthorized office party, which ended with the cops—and then an arrest. No matter what finally got him fired, Mikhail never expected to find himself at Red Star Industries’ office again.
So down-and-out Mikhail is surprised to be called in by old boss, who offers Mikhail easy money and the Land Rover of his dreams to teach his son, Sergei, how to “be a man”—and to spy on him.
Of course, Sergei’s not the Internet-obsessed recluse his father believes. He’s hiding a relationship with the beautiful Marina, who Mikhail himself can’t help but fall for as well. To keep it all together, Mikhail finds himself lying to Petrovich about his son’s activities, lying to Marina about Sergei’s intentions, and lying to Sergei about his love for Marina. So when Sergei’s father invites them all to Italy, the web of lies holding their world together begins to fall apart, and about the time Mikhail finds himself held hostage at gunpoint, he realizes he’s gotten in way over his head…
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