The Pontas Agency's team wishes a very happy and literary 2020 to everyone!
The new year (and new decade) has begun, and many books by Pontas authors are currently being edited, printed or are about to reach bookshops and shelves very soon over these coming months.
Among them is Minna Salami’s debut non-fiction Sensuous Knowledge, to be published in North America by Amistad/HarperCollins and in the UK and Commonwealth in March 2020 with Zed Books. Drawing on a range of traditions, including personal narrative, feminist theory, popular culture, philosophy and African myth, Sensuous Knowledge offers a bold, unique, Africa-centred and black feminist vision of hope for a world in crisis, and shatters our illusions around gender, race and power.
Translation rights have already been acquired by Matthes & Seiz Berlin (German), Temas de Hoy/Planeta (Spanish) and Schildts & Söderstrom (Finnish).
A Taste of Sage is a debut novel by Yaffa S. Santos to be published in English worldwide by Harper Perennial in May 2020. It tells the story of Lumi Santana, a chef with a gift: she can perceive a person’s emotions by tasting their cooking. She puts her heart and savings into opening her own fusion restaurant in Upper Manhattan. The restaurant offers a mix of the Dominican cuisine she grew up with and other world cuisines she is inspired by.
When her eclectic venture fails, she is forced to take a position as sous chef at a staid, traditional French restaurant owned by Julien Dax, a celebrated chef known for his acid tongue as well as his brilliant smile… A rom-com with a hint of magic.
The Tally Stick is a compulsive and chilling novel by established New Zealander author Carl Nixon about subjugation, survival and the meaning of family. John Chamberlain has brought his family to New Zealand from the UK. Before he starts his new job, he takes them on a driving holiday. The car skids over the road and hurtles off a cliff. The year is 1978.
In 2010 the remains of John’s older son have been discovered in a remote part of the West Coast, showing he lived for four years after the family disappeared. Found alongside him are his father’s watch and what turns out to be a tally stick, a piece of wood scored across, marking items of debt. How had he survived and then died? Where was the rest of his family? And what did the tally stick signify?
To know the answers, readers will have to wait until June 2020. The novel will be published by Penguin Random House in Australia and New Zealand and by World Editions for the rest of the English speaking world. French translation rights have already been acquired by Éditions de l'Aube.
Las maravillas (The Wonders) is a bildungsroman and debut novel by Elena Medel in which we see how money, family and social class mark the lives of two women from two different generations. An honest and lyrical portrayal of working-class women, inflicted by precariousness and patriarchy, who are plagued by the same doubt: would their lives have been different had they been born in another place, at another time, in another body?
Elena Medel’s highly anticipated debut novel is a novel in the classical sense of the term, entirely contemporary, that explores the portrayal of women, family and social class. Intertwined lives on the outskirts of a large city, Madrid, from the last years of the dictatorship to the present day. It will be published by Anagrama in September 2020 and translation rights have already been acquired by Suhrkamp (German), Pushkin Press (English) and Patakis (Greek).
For more information, please contact Anna Soler-Pont.