At Pontas we are getting ready for next Frankfurt Book Fair (15-19 October 2008). We´ll be meeting publishers and film producers from all over the world, mainly at our table J 8 at the Agent’s Center, and at parties and casual dinners every evening. Among many other projects, this year we have six new authors writing in English to sell. Susan Abulhawa, Maha Akhtar, Jeremy Ames, Parvati Nair, Sirisha Herat and Armin Wandrewala. Six names to remember.
- Susan Abulhawa is the Palestinian author currently living in Pennsylvania (USA) of The Scar of David, a powerful novel set in the lap of one of the most terrible conflicts ever, already translated into six languages.
- Maha Akhtar, former Dan Rather’s chief of staff at CBS News, has written The Maharani’s Hidden Granddaughter, a fictionalized memoir of four remarkable women through Spain, Lebanon, India and the United States.
- Jeremy Ames from Boston is the author of Game of Fate, a mystery novel set in Barcelona in the year 2000: an American student will be involved in the ETA terrrorist world.
- Sirisha Herat is setting her first novel, A Fifth Season, in post-colonial Sri Lanka: a portrayal of the decline of a family and a comment on the plight of women and the implacably rigid class system.
- Parvati Nair has written Unspeakable, an intense novel set in Madrid in the last years of Franco’s dictatorship, telling the impossible story of a teenager, daughter of an ambassador living in Madrid, and her chauffeur, a much older Spanish man. Nabokov’s Lolita meets The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller.
- Armin Wandrewala is a lawyer working in Mumbai and writing crime fiction such as The Ceremony of Innocence, where she exposes the international trafficking in aborted foetuses for brain tissue linking several continents.