Emma Thawley, Rights Director at Quercus, has sold US rights in two novels by UK novelist Rod Rees, The Demi-Monde: Winter and The Demi-Monde: Spring, to Gabe Robinson of HarperCollins, in a significant deal. The books will be published in hardback on the Morrow imprint. World rights in Rod’s series, The Demi-Monde, were acquired pre-emptively by Quercus (who publish the first volume in January 2011) from agent John Jarrold for a major advance in 2009.
"The Demi-Monde is set in a wonderfully imagined virtual world – the Demi-Monde of the title. Originally conceived by the US military as a training ground for their troops in the twenty-first century facing street fighting and enemies who use guerrilla tactics, rather than modern technology-based armies, the Demi-Monde was created by the world’s first quantum computer. Young singer Ella Thomas is sent there to rescue a VIP (she ticks all the boxes to blend into the world, which has a late-Victorian technology base) and discovers the world and its thirty million inhabitants, or ‘avatars’, are all too real. Especially those who run the world’s city-states, based on famous human monsters such as Reinhard Heydrich, Shaka Zulu, Empress Wu, Godfrey de Bouillon, Selim the Grim and Lavrentii Beria, with whom the world was seeded to make it more of a test…and that is only the beginning."
There is already a fascinating website -- pop over there now.
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