This Lovely City

INTERNATIONAL DEAL:

• U.K. and Commonwealth (ex. Canada) rights were preempted in a significant six-figure deal by the HarperCollins U.K. imprint, HQ Publishing, in October 2018. They will publish in March 2020 as a lead title on their fiction list.

PRIZE NOMINATIONS:

• In 2016, Louise was a finalist for the prestigious Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, as well as the Just Write Creative Writing Competition, for the unpublished manuscript that has since become her debut novel, This Lovely City.

TIMELY AND TOPICAL:

• Set in 1950s London and focusing on a group of Caribbean immigrants who arrived aboard the Empire Windrush, This Lovely City shines a light on cultural and racial tensions that are still very relevant today. In 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative party became embroiled in a political scandal involving the wrongful detainment, denial of legal rights, and, in at least eighty-three cases, deportation from the U.K. by the Home Office of British-born subjects who had arrived in the U.K. from Caribbean countries as part of the "Windrush generation" (named for the ship that brought the first groups of West Indian migrants to the U.K. in 1948). The scandal prompted a wider debate about British immigration policy, and the immigration policies of other countries around the world.