Sam Eades, Editorial Director at Trapeze, has acquired three novels from Sunday Times bestselling author Sharon Bolton. The deal was struck by Anne-Marie Doulton at the Ampersand Agency, for World English rights including audio. Sharon Bolton has sold over one million copies worldwide, winning the Mary Higgins Clark Award for her second novel Awakening and the CWA’s Dagger in the Library Award for a body of work.
The first novel The Craftsman will be a superlead title for Trapeze in Spring 2018.
Beginning a trilogy of ambitious, brooding thrillers, The Craftsman draws upon Sharon’s own background of growing up in the north of England, in the shadow of the Pendle Witch Trials, the Moors Murderers and the Yorkshire Ripper.
Switching between 1969 and 1999, The Craftsman is the story of a community shattered by a merciless predator, and of a young police constable, out of her depth in a climate of misogyny and superstition, battling to solve a case that could make her career. Or change her forever.
Sam Eades, Editorial Director at Orion said: ‘Sharon Bolton is a writer like no other; a writer who instinctively knows our greatest fears and explores the darkest corners of the reader’s mind. She is also one of the hardest working authors in the industry. I have been a huge admirer of hers for years, and know the team here has the vision, passion and experience to take her career to even greater heights. With The Craftsman Sharon has produced her best work yet, the thriller everyone will be talking about in 2018. She will be a jewel in the Trapeze list, and we are very lucky to be publishing her.’
Sharon Bolton, author said: ‘From our very first meeting, I was hugely impressed by the energy, enthusiasm and professionalism of the Trapeze team. I’m honoured by their confidence in me, and very much looking forward to working with them on The Craftsman.’
Anne-Marie Doulton, agent said: ‘Sam Eades’ boundless enthusiasm for and belief in Sharon’s writing together with Orion’s forensic approach to marketing, promotion and sales proved a winning combination. Sharon has spent 10 happy years with Transworld, and the decision to move on was far from easy, but in the end we were both persuaded that the invigorating environment of new imprint Trapeze offers exactly those opportunities and challenges Sharon is keen to embrace. From what I’ve seen so far of The Craftsman, readers have something exceptional in store for them.’
David Shelley, CEO of Orion said: ‘I am so thrilled that we’re going to be working with Sharon Bolton. She is one of my favourite crime writers and I can’t wait to see what she writes next. And I have every confidence that Sam Eades and her very talented, focused team will help Sharon win even more fans.’
Katie Espiner, MD of Orion said: ‘Sharon Bolton is simply one of the finest crime writers working today and I could not be more thrilled that she’s joining Orion. Sam and the team have ambitious plans in place for Sharon, and her new book is absolutely stunning – clever, claustrophobic and nerve-jangling. She’s an incredible talent and it’s a privilege to be working with her.’
Sarah Adams, Fiction Publisher at Transworld said: ‘I could not be more proud of the Transworld team for all they have done to grow Sharon’s readership over the past decade. They have published her with passion, energy and relentless determination, as her brilliant books deserve. Our time has now come to part ways and we all wish Sharon and Orion every possible success in the future.’
Sharon (formerly S J) Bolton grew up in Lancashire and, with a BA in Drama from Loughborough University, spent the early part of her career in arts and entertainment administration. In 1991, she went back into full time education to study for an MBA at Warwick University, where she met her husband Andrew. She worked in the City of London for a number of years before a chance encounter taught her that she could write fiction. In 2001, she left the corporate world to become a mother and a writer.
Her first novel, Sacrifice, was voted Best New Read by Amazon UK, whilst her second, Awakening, won the 2010 Mary Higgins Clark Award (part of the prestigious Edgars) in the US. In 2014, Lost, (UK title, Like This, For Ever) was named RT Magazine’s Best Contemporary Thriller in the US, and in France Now You See Me won the Plume de Bronze. That same year, Sharon was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library, for her entire body of work.
She has been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger, the Theakston’s Prize for Best Thriller, the International Thriller Writers’ Best First Novel award, the Prix Du Polar in France and the Martin Beck award in Sweden.
With ten books to her name, Sharon is a Sunday Times bestselling author and has been described by a reviewer for that newspaper as being ‘unable to write a sentence not suffused with menace.’
Sharon lives with her family in the Chiltern Hills, not far from Oxford.
THE CRAFTSMAN will be published in Spring 2018 in audio, ebook and hardback.
Watching Question Time this week (special scheduling with Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith) I was struck, not for the first time by:
- What a charming, principled, honest man Jeremy Corbyn appears to be.
- The certainty that the British public will elect him prime minister when hell freezes over.
The last thing we want in our elected representatives is honesty. For all that we rail against the disingenuousness of MPs, we want comforting lies, not inconvenient truths – usually, a version of “all will be well, spending on public services will increase massively, the economy won’t suffer and no one’s taxes will rise.”
So it is with crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers. We don’t want the truth, or at least not until the very last chapter. We want to be teased with it, fed a few lies along the way, have the facts dangled tantalisingly out of reach.
Hence our on-going obsession with the unreliable narrator.
At the CrimeTime festival on the island of Gotland last month, there came the inevitable question about the reliability of narrators in crime writing. I drew a breath, ready to launch into a well-rehearsed explanation of why I love and use the device of the unreliable narrator so much. But no. Malin Persson Giolito had an entirely different take on the subject. She wanted to know whether there is such a thing, in fiction, as the reliable narrator.
What a good question. And one that could apply equally well to real life. Whenever we relate events, it seems to me, we bring a vanload of baggage that inevitably colours our interpretation and therefore our narration. Our mood, our relationship with our audience, their on-going reactions, how we felt about the event, how we felt about the behaviour of ourselves and others will all impact upon how we tell the story. Someone else, with exactly the same experience, might describe events quite differently. Which is correct? Both, of course, because neither of us is lying per se. On the other hand, neither of us is telling the entire truth. We are telling our own version of it. We are narrators, but not entirely reliable.
The police are well used to the unreliability of witnesses. People remember different things, place emphasis differently. They even invent and embellish memories. Conflicting witness accounts are a difficulty the police grapple with on a regular basis. They learn never to take a complaint entirely on face value.
I’m not about to suggest, because I wouldn’t dare, that victims of crime are rarely entirely blameless themselves. What I will say is that victims invariably feel a sense of guilt, a belief that on some level they contributed to their own misfortune. Victim blaming, arguably, begins with the victim himself: the car-theft victim who left his keys in the ignition, the man who was beaten up after swearing at some kids on the street. When describing the event to the police, these people have an entirely normal tendency to minimise their own role in what transpired. To lessen their own perceived guilt, people tell less than the whole story. The job of the detective is to fill in the gaps.
Even stepping away from criminality for a second, we all have secrets, things we’ll never tell another living soul. (If you don’t you probably need to get a life!)
We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of, have views that we might not feel comfortable airing in all situations. We none of us tell the whole story.
And so it goes in fiction. Story telling is a constant balancing act, between the knowledge the author has and must hold back until the time is right, and the desire of the reader to know as much as possible. And so it should be, because there is nothing like a question in the reader’s mind to get the pages turning, and turning, and turning.
My ten favourite unreliable narrators:
- Amy and Nick Dunne in Gillian Flynne’s Gone Girl
- Pi in Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi
- Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel of the same name.
- Teddy in Denis Lehane’s Shutter Island
- “The black pawn” in Joanne Harris’s Gentlemen and Players.
- Tessa in Lisa Gardner’s Love You More
- Julia in Tess Gerritsen’s Playing With Fire.
- Mrs De Winter in Daphne Du Maurier’s
- Jenna in Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go
- And Lacey Flint in Now You See Me (of course!)
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