McClelland & Stewart Acquires Novel from Award-winning Canadian Poet Steven Price

TORONTO, Nov. 10, 2014 /CNW/ - McClelland and Stewart is very pleased to announce that, after a strongly competitive  auction with three other Canadian houses, publisher Ellen Seligman has acquired, in a two-book deal, By Gaslight, a literary historical suspense novel by award-winning Canadian poet Steven Price. Agent Ellen Levine of Trident Media Group arranged the sale. One of the most talked-about books of the Frankfurt Book Fair, By Gaslight was also recently acquired at auction by Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and by Juliet Mabey of Oneworld in London. Translation rights have, to date, been bought by Bompiani in Italy and by Diogenes in Germany. Other international rights sales are expected to be announced soon.

"The novel is just astonishing, absolutely dazzling," says Seligman, who will also be the editor for the book."It has everything -- brilliant writing, surprise, palpable atmosphere and sustained tension, psychological depth and complexity. Steven's characters come immediately alive on the page and just keep gaining and gaining dimension. By Gaslight is a literary tour de force, as is fast becoming recognized around the world."       

Set in 1885, three years before the Whitechapel killings in London, By Gaslight centres on the complex relationship between William Pinkerton, the greatest detective of his age, and Adam Foole, a thief whose past is inextricably linked with Pinkerton's own. The novel spans twenty years and travels between the diamond mines of South Africa in the 1870s, the battlefields of the Civil War, and the opium dens and sewers of late Victorian London.

Steven Price is the author of two poetry books, Anatomy of Keys (2006), winner of the Gerald Lampert Award, and Omens in the Year of the Ox (2012), winner of the ReLit Award. His first novel, Into That Darkness, was published to acclaim in 2011. He lives in Victoria, B.C.

SOURCE: News - Media

please contact Scott Sellers at [phone] or [email protected].