andrew lownie literary agency

News

  • Play of The Custard Boys, compared upon publication to Lord of the Flies, opens at Tabard Theatre

    10 Apr 2012

    THE CUSTARD BOYS based on the novel by agency author John Rae and adapted and directed by the Bafta-winning Glenn Chandler, creator of Taggart opens tonight at the Tabard Theatre, London, and plays until 12th May.

    Five London schoolboys are evacuated to a Norfolk seaside village, far from Hitler’s bombs. They want to fight for England but are too young to join up and too old to wait. They join the school army cadet force and learn to fire rifles, they form a gang and play at being soldiers. But it is not real war.

    Sixteen year old John Curlew dreams of being a Spitfire pilot. Mark Stein is Jewish and a pacifist refugee who hates the war and longs for it to end. When these two boys are thrown together and form a romantic bond, their friendship splits the group and invites fear and prejudice. But it is a challenge to a rival gang which becomes the catalyst for a sinister train of events. While men die in their thousands overseas, in a small corner of rural England a group of schoolboys embark on a final war game which will lead ultimately to tragedy.

    The Custard Boys was filmed in the 1960s as Reach for Glory and is a story of sexual awakening, loyalty and betrayal which was compared upon publication to Lord of the Flies.

  • Memoir on the unfolding nature of our relationships with parents bought by Hodder

    10 Apr 2012

    Carol Lee’s latest memoir To Be Beloved on the unfolding nature of our relationships with parents as they age and as the roles and boundaries between us begin to alter has been bought by Hodder for publication next year.

  • Three agency titles in Sunday Times Top 10

    08 Apr 2012

    Three agency authors have top ten Sunday Times non-fiction paperback best-sellers this week.

    Cathy Glass’s A Baby’s Cry at no 3

    Lynne Barrett-Lee the ghost on The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers at no 5

    Harry Keeble and Kris Hollington for Hurting Too Much at no 10.

  • April edition Words with Jam

    07 Apr 2012

    Andrew Lownie’s regular column in the April issue of Words with Jam magazine can be found at

    http://issuu.com/wordswithjam/docs/april2012issue?mode=window&viewMode=doublePage&pageNumber=37

  • Five Days That Shocked The World serialised in Daily Mail

    07 Apr 2012

    Nick Best’s Five Days That Shocked The World: An Oral History of Europe at the End of World War Two is serialised in the Daily Mail today.

  • Two new Paul Merrill titles to Random House (Australia)

    06 Apr 2012

    Random House (Australia) who bought ANZ rights in Paul Merrill’s hilarious journalist memoirs Can We Cook the Dwarf ? have now bought ANZ rights in the first two books in his humorous politically incorrect stocking filler parenting series .

    Muddle Your Way Through Fatherhood: How to fool people into thinking you’re a great dad and Muddle Your Way Through Being a Grandparent: How to fool people into thinking you’re a great Granny or Gramps will be published next year and US and UK rights are currently on offer.

  • The Sixty Billion Pound War to Yale

    05 Apr 2012

    Yale have bought Frank Ledwidge’s audit of the human, financial and political cost of the war in Afghanistan The Sixty Billion Pound War to be published next spring.

  • Four agency titles in top fifteen

    04 Apr 2012

    Another week with four agency books, split equally between Harper Collins and SImon & Schuster, in the top fifteen of the paperback non-fiction list. Congratulations to

    Cathy Glass whose A Baby’s Cry is no 3

    Lynne Barrett-Lee the ghost on The Baby Laundry at no 7

    Harry Keeble and Kris Hollinton whose Hurting Too Much is at no 14

    Casey Watson whose Crying for Help is at no 15

  • Book on U2 sold to St Martin's Press

    04 Apr 2012

    US rights in music journalist John Jobling’s unauthorised history of the Irish rock band U2 have been sold to St Martin’s Press.

  • Kris Hollington's play Scream re-broadcast on Good Friday

    27 Mar 2012

    Radio 4 are re-broadcasting Kris Hollington’s shortlisted play of the year Scream on Good Friday, 9pm, 6 April.

    Written by Kris Hollington and directed by Boz Temple Morris, Scream is a crime caper telling the extraordinary but true story behind the theft of Edvard Munch’s expressionist masterpiece from an Oslo museum in 2004.

    Recorded entirely on location in Olso, the cast of SCREAM includes many of Norway’s leading actors.

    Oslo police are closing in on the criminal mastermind behind Europe’s largest and most spectacular cash robbery (the gang had blown up a police station as a distraction) when two incompetent criminals burst into the Munch Museum and ask for directions to Norway’s most famous painting. Amazingly, they emerge with The Scream and The Madonna. So begins a high profile and bizarre cat and mouse chase as police attempt to track down the world’s most valuable painting and arrest the robbers. Could it be that the criminal mastermind, David Toska, has commissioned the theft of the Scream simply to divert police resources from the investigation into his cash robbery?

    A tale of love, murder, fatal illnesses and a unique chocolate obsession, Scream is a caper tale with added angst -

    “We arrive on this earth screaming and we die screaming, screaming inside with the frustration of the shortness of life and the terror of death!”