A round-up of the year at Greyhound by Charlie Campbell

Greyhounds usually take fourteen months to reach full size, with larger Greyhounds needing up to eighteen. Some clearly keep growing. In three years, Greyhound Literary has doubled in size, from five agents to ten; from weekly meetings in a kitchen in Peckham Rye to our own office in Holborn, via a corporate box in the Kia Oval; and from sending two agents to the Frankfurt book fair to four.

Book fairs are publishing’s litmus test. They can be stressful, as you are surrounded by everyone else’s successes, the six- and seven-figure deals struck months ago, but announced over a short period just before a fair. It is all designed to trigger a buying frenzy among publishers and mild trauma in the writers, editors and agents who do not have that elusive book of the fair. At the same time, fairs provide the exhilarating opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new contacts from around the world, all the while talking endlessly about our authors and their books.

This year, we approached Frankfurt with plenty of excitement. Our rights guide had expanded significantly, to cover many more genres than in previous years, and we felt confident that we had excellent books to offer any publisher that we might meet. We were meeting editors from all around the world and between the four of us we had over two hundred meetings with some terrific engagement with our list. 

Highlights included Yvvette Edwards’s powerful family story, The Death and Life of Ellen Fenton, which Salma Begum sold to Virago at auction in her first deal for the agency; Max Doty’s horror novel, The House That Eats the Dead, sold by Maria Brannan to Tor in the UK (with US and screen deals also agreed); and Ben Lewis’s art history romp The Forger of Siena, which Philip Gwyn Jones sold to the University of Chicago Press. (All will be published in 2026.) And on Wednesday evening at the fair, we went to watch our rights director Sam play with his jazz band, the Editorial Standards, late into the night. 

This year also saw publication of Reading Lessons, Carol Atherton's gorgeously written love letter to the books that shape who we become both as individuals and a society; In the Jingle Jangle Jungle, Joel Gion’s riotous memoir about his time in the legendary band, the Brian Jonestown Massacre; and Edward Brooke-Hitching’s endlessly surprising miscellany The Most Interesting Book in the World. In paperback, there was further success for Manni Coe’s brother.do.you.love.me (illustrated by his brother Reuben) and Marchelle Farrell’s memoir Uprooting was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. And in children’s books, Beach continued to delight younger readers with Big Bad Dragon Club and The Dragon with the Blazing Bottom at Christmas. On the film side, it was thrilling to see A Sacrifice, adapted from Nicholas Hogg’s novel, in cinemas and the agency struck a number of significant screen deals which will be announced in due course.

In 2025, look out for Julia Raeside’s Don’t Make Me Laugh (Bedford Square), a darkly funny novel about power dynamics, predatory male behaviour and manipulation in the world of stand-up comedy. Other fiction highlights include Richard Strachan’s The Unrecovered (Raven), a gothic historical thriller set in WW1 Scotland; Vijay Khurana’s unsettling novel about a teenage road trip The Passenger Seat (Peninsula); Gethan Dick’s Water in the Desert Fire in the Night (Tramp), a novel about the end of the world unlike any other; and Molly O’Neill’s Greenteeth (Orbit), a charming fantasy novel narrated by a lake-dwelling monster. And that’s just the first half of the year. In the autumn, Zaffre publish SJ Bennett’s The Queen Who Came in from the Cold, the fifth title in this brilliant series, pitting Her Majesty against Soviet spy masters. In nonfiction, Owain Mulligan’s savagely comic memoir of the Iraq War, The Accidental Soldier, is out in April from Hodder; Jen Moore’s Endometriosis: Understand Your Symptoms, Get the Right Treatment, Reclaim Your Life (Green Tree) will provide a lifeline for sufferers of this disease;  and Robert Elms’s Blitz: The Club that Created the ‘80s, the definitive biography of the legendary Blitz club, will be published by Faber.

Outside the office, in April Sam went to Munich and in June, Maria travelled to Barcelona, to meet publishers. There is something special about visiting editors in their offices, with the time you don’t always have at book fairs. Later she and Sam made a trip to WorldCon in Glasgow, where they attended a superb panel on Female Rage in SFF (though disappointed to have been unable to get into the sold out event on Fungi in Speculative Fiction). Next up, trips to Paris and the Netherlands, along with the usual book fairs. 

We ended the year with the very welcome addition of Alexander Cochran who joins after thirteen years at C&W, where he worked first in translation rights and then as a primary agent. He arrives with his exciting list of clients and brings the number of agents at Greyhound to ten. Woof!