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EXCLUSIVE: The deals are popping this week, and publishing is not immune. 
On the basis of a 4-page proposal, Alfred Knopf’s Sonny Mehta has paid $2.5 million for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the new novel by Kiran Desai. She’s the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss. Robin Desser is the acquiring editor. This is the time for big book deals in the run up to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which gets underway in Germany next week. The publishing crowd was also buzzing over the fact that the deal was brokered by Andrew Wylie, who signed her 2 weeks ago from Inkwell Management. She left to join Wylie because he reps her partner, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk.
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This isn’t even close to the dough Knopf paid for Jhumpa. Must have been a so-so set of pages.
If you like literary fiction (or if you insist, “literary” fiction), The Inheritance of Loss is pretty good. Not great but very readable.
Inheritance of Loss was better than good, I thought, though not as impressive as, say, The Line of Beauty. This advance can’t be seen as anything but good for serious writers and readers.
You have to wonder, given how bad things are in publishing, especially for literary fiction, if this isn’t in part a PR stunt to show everyone that Knopf is healthy and Mehta’s at the top of his game. As a reviewer, I’m suspicious.
This is ridiculous and akin to the money paid to Justin Cronin for “The Passage” which was terrible. It’s a novel without a main character, any narrative drive, defined characters or the basic rudiments of a story. Publishing is in trouble partly because it believes the hype.
So what’s new? Publishers have always been gamblers.
I think this is absolutely the dumbest PR stunt I’ve ever heard. The book’s not written yet, so all this buzz Desai is getting now won’t do the book any good in the future. People have a short attention span. Who is going to remember this bit of information 3 or 4 years from now when the book actually comes out?
Or, if it ever comes out at all?
@Tom Hunter: I’m actually reading The Passage right now, and I actually liked it in the beginning. Now, I’m about at page 500, and I’m like, “Dude, where was your editor? These characters are boring.”