Announcing Lanny, Max Porter’s second novel 

We are delighted to announce the acquisition of Max Porter’s second novel, Lanny.

There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.

This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth.

Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

‘Lanny tells a devastating story, and it tells it with the anarchy, the humour and the enchantment Porter’s readers will recognise from Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Playful, irreverent, full of magic, it brings us the best and the worst in English civic life. It’s a warning about what we stand to lose and a hymn to everything we will never fully understand. It will haunt the imagination for years to come.’ Mitzi Angel, Publisher, Faber & Faber

Lanny will be published in March 2019. Mitzi Angel has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Lisa Baker at Aitken Alexander. Lanny will be published by Graywolf in the US and Strange Light, a new imprint from Penguin Random House Canada. Other territories confirmed include Denmark (Gyldendal), France (Le Seuil), Germany (Kein & Aber), Netherlands (De Bezige Bij), Norway (Gyldendal), Spain (Literatura Random House), Catalonia (Catedral), Sweden (Sekwa).

Max Porter’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, was published to widespread acclaim in 2015. It has been sold in twenty-seven territories and won the Sunday Times/ Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. Complicité and Wayward’s production of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy has just opened in Dublin.