booktrade.info

Wednesday 14th May

Press Release: Deals Done
Hutchinson To Publish Debut Novel By Rachel Heath

Posted at 7:40PM Wednesday 26 Mar 2008

Hutchinson publishing director Caroline Gascoigne has acquired world rights to publish Rachel Heath in a two-book deal from Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White. The first novel, The Finest Type of English Womanhood, will be published in 2009.

The Finest Type of English Womanhood is set in England and in post-war, pre-apartheid Johannesburg. Told through two female voices, it concerns young women adrift in both familiar and foreign parts of the world in the mid-twentieth century, and how they cope with their newly developing sexuality and independence. It incorporates the story which became know as the Porthole Murder Mystery, in which a young actress, Gay Gibson, was murdered on the ship the Durban Castle as it returned to Britain from South Africa in 1947.

Caroline Gascoigne says, "You know the moment you start to read this book that you're in the hands of a born storyteller. Rachel's writing combines acute psychological drama with a sensationally good evocation of young women's lives and loves. I think this is the start of a brilliant career".

Rachel Heath says, "I grew up knowing the bare facts of Gay Gibson's story - that she was murdered aboard a Union Castle liner by the deck steward James Camb, that the trial was a scandal and that he was found guilty but doubts about his guilt remain to this day. My grandparents and mother had gone to live in Johannesburg after the war, where my grandfather ran SABC - and he had known Gay Gibson. In fact he is mentioned as one of her 'boyfriends' in the trial transcripts, and was thought to have written her a note of introduction to a theatrical agent in London when she left Johannesburg so hastily that October in 1948.

"It was a good story, sordid and glamorous at once. It was from these bare facts that the novel grew, I knew I wanted to write about the unusual city of Johannesburg, its unease and tensions, but also to write about it as an atmospheric backdrop against the interior life of two adolescent women in a time when adolescence didn't really exist."

Peter Straus says, "This is an exciting debut about the young female experience and all the edginess that goes with it. There are echoes of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley and Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal, but Rachel's Heath's compelling and highly readable novel announces a new voice."

Rachel Heath was born in Bristol in 1968. She studied Drama and English at Hull University, she worked in publishing in London before leaving to raise her family. She lives in Bath with her husband, a screen-writer and their three children. This is her first novel.

CONTACT:

Emma Mitchell, Hutchinson Publicity Director, Random House

0207 840 8610 emitchell@randomhouse.co.uk