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Canongate has snapped up Exit Wounds, the latest memoir by Peter Godwin, about "trying to regain your bearings when things fall apart".
Editor at large Ellah Wakatama acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) in Godwin’s latest memoir from Andrew Wylie and James Pullen at the Wylie Agency. South African rights were sold to Terry Morris at Pan Macmillan South Africa and US rights were acquired by Judy Clain at Little, Brown.
Exit Wounds, which will be published in the autumn of 2024, is a family memoir, as are Godwin’s earlier works, Mukiwa (Picador) and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (Picador/Little, Brown).
The synopsis says: "As his 20-year marriage collapses in New York, Peter’s mother summons him to London where she lies dying. There, the usually guarded matriarch finally opens up.
"Rendered in strikingly lyrical prose, Exit Wounds hits universal chords. It is a book about getting lost and trying to find your way home, about exile, physical and spiritual. And what it means to be a man with a weakness for strong women: his mother, his sisters, and his wife."
After working as a human rights lawyer, Godwin became an award-winning foreign correspondent, author and screenwriter. He has written six books, including Mukiwa, which received the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones Award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which won the Borders Original Voices Award.
His book The Fear (Little, Brown) was selected by the New Yorker as a best book of the year. He has taught at Princeton and Wesleyan, and currently teaches at the MFA programme at Columbia. From 2012-15 he served as President of the PEN American Centre, and he is an Orwell fellow as well as a Guggenheim fellow.
Godwin said: "I’m pleased that Exit Wounds has found such an enthusiastic reception at Canongate, and glad to be working with my fellow Zimbabwean, Ellah Wakatama, a collaboration we’ve been plotting to achieve for years."
Wakatama added: "I have loved the humanity, humour and vulnerability of Peter Godwin’s writing from his very first book. Reading Exit Wounds is like embarking on a journey through the losses, realisations and seismic shifts of middle age – the change in relationships with partner and children, the loss of parents, the knowledge that the time ahead is so much less than the time past. It is the story of one who has lived in extraordinary times, and still wants to tell the tale."