Hachette UK imprint Tinder Press has bought a debut short story collection from Naomi Ishiguro, the daughter of the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro who won the Nobel Prize in 2017 and was knighted last year.
Tinder Press publisher Mary-Anne Harrington acquired British and Commonwealth rights from Peter Straus at RCW in London. Arabic rights have not yet been sold.
Entitled Escape Routes, the collection is described by the publisher as “exuberantly original”. The stories “tap into a fascination with all things fairy tale, focusing on characters trapped by their own limitations or others’ expectations of them.”
Harrington said: “What impressed me particularly about Escape Routes was the way these wonderfully varied stories resonate together as a collection. There’s something delightfully fresh and contemporary about Naomi’s magical take on the world, like a kind of bittersweet Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I’m incredibly excited to be launching her career as a writer here at Tinder Press.’
Naomi Ishiguro worked for two years as a bookseller and bibliotherapist at Mr. B’s Emporium in Bath, and studied for a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia – where her father also studied for the same Masters in 1980.
She said: “These stories really started from talking to customers every day at Mr B’s. I began to see how books become our “escape routes” out of the ordinary world – out of drudgery, mundanity, out of set ways of thinking and our own emotional limitations. This isn’t a book about books, but it’s definitely something I wrote for all the readers I talked to, who inspired me in showing me just how magical and important storytelling’s flights of imagination and empathy can be.’
Tinder Press will publish in the UK in hardback e-book and audio in February 2020.
