Book Radar: Paul Auster, Martyn Burke, Paula McLain, Kathleen Alcott, Michael Crichton, Christian McKay Heidicker

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

From Publishers Lunch, news of the following book deals...

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions, and Sunset Park), about the four parallel lives of one 20th-century, American boy, to Holt for publication in February 2017.

Music for Love or War by Martyn Burke, a novel of the clash of civilizations of Hollywood and Afghanistan, to Tyrus Books for publication this December. Its opening lines: “According to what we’ve been told, the source of all knowledge is somewhere just south of Sunset Boulevard. The problem is that Danny has lost the address.”

Lovers and Exiles by Paula McLain (The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun), based on the life of Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent who was also Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, to Ballantine for publication in 2017.

America was Hard to Find by Kathleen Alcott (Infinite Home), tracing the fallout of an affair between an astronaut and a radical anti-war activist on their families, friends, colleagues, and, especially, their child, from the 1960s through the Cold War, a period of time when Americans’ understanding of their own country utterly changed, to Ecco.

The late Michael Crichton’s Dragon Teeth, following the rivalry between real-life paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh during a time of intense fossil speculation and discovery in the American West in 1878, told through the adventures of a young fictional character named William Johnson who is apprenticed first to one, then to the other and not only makes discoveries of historic proportion, but transforms into an inspiring hero, found in the Michael Crichton Archives by his widow Sherri, who says it “was clearly a very important book for Michael,” to Harper for publication in May 2017.

Christian McKay Heidicker’s Throw Your Arm Across Your Eyes and Scream, pitched as Pleasantville meets Cloverfield, following the 15-year-old daughter of the woman who was carried to the top of the Empire State Building by King Kong, in a world where the horrors of 1940s and 50s sci-fi movies are everyday occurrences, to Simon & Schuster Children’s for publication in Summer 2018.