Turkish Rights Deal for Rod Rees
Flora McMichael, Rights Manager at Quercus, has sold Turkish rights in DEMI-MONDE: WINTER by UK novelist Rod Rees to Inkilap.
World rights in Rod’s four-book DEMI-MONDE series were acquired pre-emptively by Quercus (who published the first volume successfully in January 2011, and in paperback in September) from agent John Jarrold for a major advance in 2009. Rights have now been sold in ten territories, also including the US, Germany, Russia, France, Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Italy.
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 a fascinating website at www.thedemi-monde.com