Andersen Press Sign Suffragette YA Novel
Sally Nicholls has joined the Andersen Press list with a suffragette-based YA novel Things a Bright Girl Can Do, set for release in hardback in September 2017. This is the first in a two-book deal signed by Charlie Sheppard, Publishing Director at Andersen Press, negotiated with Jodie Hodges at United Agents. Andersen Press hold world rights.
According to the publisheer, Things a Bright Girl Can Do follows three courageous young women as they join the fight for the vote, through rallies and marches, in polite drawing rooms and freezing prison cells and the poverty-stricken slums of the East End.
Evelyn is seventeen, and though she is rich and clever, she may never be allowed to follow her older brother to university. Enraged that she is expected to marry her childhood sweetheart rather than be educated, she joins the Suffragettes, and vows to pay the ultimate price for women’s freedom.
May is fifteen, and already sworn to the cause, though she and her fellow Suffragists refuse violence. When she meets Nell, a girl who’s grown up in hardship, she sees a kindred spirit. Together and in love, the two girls start to dream of a world where all kinds of women have their place.
Released just before the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which finally allowed women to vote, Things a Bright Girl Can Do comes as our own political landscape is in turmoil, and the protests of those under-represented and marginalised are headline news.
Charlie Sheppard, Publishing Director at Andersen, describes the history behind the book, and signing Sally to the fiction list:
“I have been looking for a book with suffragettes at its heart since 2013, when the Jockey Club did not give Emily Wilding Davison a minute’s of silence to mark the centenary of the fateful day at Epsom Derby when she threw herself under the King’s Horse.
I wanted to publish a book about suffragettes that would reach young people. We commissioned Sally Nicholls, whose writing I have admired for a very long time, to write one for us and the result is stunning and its publication will be a celebration of and testament to the young women of the past who sacrificed so much for us. What they did must never be forgotten or taken for granted.”
Author, Sally Nicholls added, “It’s been a privilege to work on this book, to learn about early feminists and to compare their experiences to the battles still being fought by women today. With all that’s happened in the last year, it feels like such an important story for young readers to hear. Their fight must never be forgotten.”
Things a Bright Girl Can Do will be released September 2017, hardback £12.99
http://www.andersenpress.co.uk/
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