Don’t look
now, Fergie, but there’s a new royal nuisance in town:
Behold the saucy, 18th-century Danish princess Louise
Augusta, whose mug may not have been plastered on
the cover of The Sun in her day, but who’s knocking
readers silly in Denmark this month as the sultry subject
of Maria Helleberg’s bestselling historical novel,
Love Child. Louise Augusta (actually the illegitimate
daughter of King Christian VII’s personal physician,
J.F. Struensee, who later became Prime Minister
only to be beheaded for treason), was not only the product
of frolicsome passion but was also known for wildly
erotic hoedowns with her hubby, Frederik Christian
(a.k.a. the Duke of Augustenborg). His bookish, lachrymose
demeanor was an unlikely match for her gay spontaneity,
but their “difficult yet deeply satisfying” matrimonial
life “unexpectedly comes quite close to the idea of
equality.” Who knew? Called a “weighty new novel” and
“an intense literary experience,” the book delves into
this royal relationship while placing Denmark’s love
child against a background of political intrigue. The
prolific Helleberg has written children’s books, travel
accounts, and reviews, and her narrative chops have
spanned the fall of Troy as told by Cassandra (in The
Prophetess) and a reworking of a 14th-century Swedish
rhymed chronicle of King Erik (Like a Plow of Wrath).
Her work has been translated in Estonia (Kunst)
and Germany (Eichborn), and all rights to the
new one are open from Torben Madsen of Denmark’s
Samleren Publishers.
Also throwing
paternity to the wind in Denmark, a seemingly well-adapted
student of medicine stuns her parents with the news
of her pregnancy in Anne Marie Løn’s novel Whose
Child? Raised in a deeply religious home in Western
Jutland, protagonist Bianca steams off to Africa as
a volunteer and returns six months later with more questions
than answers, the most pressing of which involves the
future of her unborn child. The widely published Løn
is well known for her 1998 novel The Dance of the
Dwarves, a tale of love as told by a 32-year-old
midget (the book’s up to 70,000 copies in print), and
her 1996 novel The Princesses, the story of a
landowner’s two daughters and their turbulent life in
early 20th-century Jutland, has sold more than 100,000
copies. Meanwhile the author has pocketed the Bilcher
Prize, Egholt Prize, Literature Prize
of Weekendavisen, and The Golden Laurels
— the latter the annual prize of the Danish booksellers.
Rights for The Dance of the Dwarves have been
sold in France (Gaïa), Sweden (Anamma),
and Germany (Knaus), but rights for the new one,
just published last month, are up for grabs. All translation
rights for Løn are handled by the Leonhardt &
Høier Literary Agency in Denmark.
In Greece,
Athenian journalist Stelios Koulojlou’s admonitory
title Never Go to the Post Office Alone has been
riveting readers with its spotlight on romance and political
conspiracy during the twilight of the Soviet Union.
Packed with a panoply of intriguing underworld types
— a prostitute born in the gulag, a mafia don who hooks
up American grooms and Russian brides, and a hardcore
Italian communist — the book is based in part on the
author’s toil as a political analyst and editor in Greece,
and stints as a correspondent in Paris and Moscow, where
he’s chronicled the radical changes sweeping the Soviet
landscape over the last decade. Behold left-wing American
journalist Kevin Danacher, who ripens from ’70s student
activist to suspected Soviet agent after a sojourn in
Moscow. With the FBI hot on his trail, Danacher’s alibis
start to unravel as he explains his involvement in shady
dealings of particular interest to American secret services,
while also getting firmly entangled with Madlis, the
beautiful East German (and suspected KGB agent) who
was implicated in the events leading to the fall of
the Berlin Wall. (The title derives from Madlis and
Danacher’s chance meeting as he waits in line at a Moscow
post office.) Called a “fascinating erotic spying thriller,”
the book has sold 15,000 copies to date, and rights
are available from Oceanida.
Sweden’s
own grassy-knoll theory is getting a test-drive this
month as Professor of Criminology Leif G.W. Persson
roils the conspiratorial waters with Between the
Promise of Summer and the Cold of Winter, his novel
about the 1986 murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme
and the near-fatal wounding of his wife, Lisbet.
Hard-drinking criminal investigator Lars Johansson tots
up a laundry list of far-flung suspects, including Kurdish
activists, Iraqi agents, South African apartheid agitators,
and even the CIA. The author, who’s been touted as a
cross between Mersey Beat and John le Carré,
has just returned to fiction after a 20-year hiatus,
and his three previous novels based on the Johansson
character (which became blockbuster films in Sweden)
have been deemed “seductively racy” and “riveting reading
for everyone interested in the dark side of politics
and policing.” The new one has 80,000 copies in print,
and rights have been sold to Denmark (Modtryk),
France (Presses de la Cité), and Italy (Marsilio).
Contact Niclas Salomonsson of the Salomonsson
Agency.
In Spain,
a group of women jailed in Franco’s prisons following
the Spanish Civil War have been given their due in Dulce
Chacón’s novel The Sleeping Voice. The book
follows those Madrilenians who “raise the flag of dignity
and courage as the only weapon against humiliation,
torture and death,” and who were often summarily shot
for their efforts. The haunting literary upshot is that
Chacón “has been able to construct a fiction without
hardly inventing anything.” With 30,000 copies sold,
the book is on submission in France, Italy, Germany,
and most of Europe; for US rights, contact the Antonia
Kerrigan Literary Agency.
And for
what it’s worth, Germany is barking up a storm about
Brigitte magazine columnist Elke Heidenreich
and her former husband Bernd Schroeder’s new
collection of short stories, Rowing Dogs, which
has apparently captivated the literary world and their
canine pals. The pups referenced in the title are actually
part of a bronze sculpture that the authors are said
to have stumbled upon in a Parisian flea market. With
much post-Frankfurt buzz — and a media-friendly story
about an author involved in an intricate Halloween-night
love triangle, replete with bizarre costumes — the book
has become an instant, 150,000-copy bestseller. Contact
Jennifer Lyons at Writers House for US
rights and Tanja Howarth in the UK.
