Book Radar: Jessica Keener, Keir Graff, Elizabeth Strout, Elizabeth Crane, Tim Wirkus, Denis Johnson, Mike McCormack, Stephen King & Owen King

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...

Jessica Keener’s STRANGERS IN BUDAPEST, about a grieving father, convinced his son-in-law has murdered his daughter, who travels from Boston to Budapest to take matters into his own hands when an American couple and their newly adopted son—also in Budapest—become dangerously entangled in the father’s obsession for revenge, pitched as reminiscent of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, to Algonquin for publication in 2017.

Booklist Online editor and author of The Other Felix and the upcoming The Matchstick Castle Keir Graff’s THE PHANTOM TOWER, where a pre-war apartment building in Chicago turns out to be a portal—for an hour a day—to its ghostly, never-built twin; when a couple of kids stumble upon the tower—whose residents may be alive, dead, or something...different—they’ve got to find their way back to reality, to Putnam Children’s.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout’s ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, exploring the adult lives of the characters who grew up with Lucy Barton in Amgash, Illinois, to Random House for publication in June 2017.

Author of The History of Great Things and We Only Know So Much, Elizabeth Crane’s story collection TURF, featuring stories that explore and satirize our search for identity and belonging, tales of realism that blend into the fantastical, to Soft Skull for publication in Summer 2017.

Tim Wirkus’s THE INFINITE FUTURE, a genre-bending novel set in Brazil, Idaho, and outer space, which follows a librarian, a writer on the lam, and a disgraced historian, on an impossible quest for a fabled mystical book, whose pages we eventually find ourselves in, pitched as a mix of Bolano and Bradbury, to Penguin Press.

National Book Award and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson’s story collection (all original material except for two stories), for publication in January 2018, and a novel about a deposed Middle Eastern dictator retelling his life’s story as he is being interrogated, to Random House.

Irish author Mike McCormack’s SOLAR BONES, shortlisted for The Goldsmith Prize; on All Souls Day it is said in Ireland that the dead may turn up in their own home, and so we meet a middle-aged engineer who turns up between 12 noon and 1 p.m. at his kitchen table and reflects on the events that took him away and how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day, to Soho Press.

Stephen King and son Owen King’s SLEEPING BEAUTIES, a novel set in the near future, to Scribner for publication in 2017.