Philip Gwyn Jones, publisher-at-large at Scribe UK has pre-emptively acquired from Michelle Kass of MKA world rights in an exceptional novel, Lux, by Elizabeth Cook.
Of the novel, he said: ‘Like Arundhati Roy, Elizabeth Cook is that very special kind of writer who lets almost two decades unfold between publishing her first and second novels. Her first was the much-lauded Achilles (Methuen, 2001); the second, which Scribe will publish in spring 2019 in both the UK and Australia, is Lux – a revisiting of the ancient love story of David and Bathsheba, which breathes vivid new life into those mythical representations of intelligence, desire, despair, destiny and remorse, before bringing the reader to a cold stone cell in the Tower of London, where languishes Sir Thomas Wyatt, in the aftermath of the execution of his putative lover Ann Boleyn, and there moved to compose his responses to King David’s psalms of shame and penitence. It is a story of faith and fidelity, power and its abuses, love and its flights. There is nothing modish or sensationalist at all about the re-telling; it is something like a cathedral of a novel, possessing vast interior space and immemorial solidity — it is morally challenging, full of resonant echoes and yet whisperingly intimate. A novel for grown-ups. If the juries are not distracted, it ought to contend for prizes.’
Elizabeth Cook is a librettist, poet and novelist. She lives in Suffolk.