Riverhead Books
Acquires Debut Novel
by Sylvia Sellers-Garcia
NEW YORK, NY/2/7/06Geoffrey Kloske, Vice President and Publisher of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), has announced the acquisition of The Open Ground, an extraordinarily compelling debut novel by Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, a writer who grew up bilingual and whose fiction has won the Robie Macauley Prize and been cited in Best American Short Stories.
An immigration story in reverse, The Open Ground follows a man who returns to his parents’ homeland of Guatemala after his father’s death and finds a place that holds secrets that promise to answer haunting questions about his family’s past. In the tradition of notable Riverhead debuts such as Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Junot Diaz’s Drown, and Cristina Henríquez’s Come Together, Fall Apart, Sellers-Garcia’s novel tells a story that is at once intensely personal and deeply political, and confirms Riverhead’s tradition of publishing fiction from fresh new perspectives.
Riverhead Editor Megan Lynch acquired North American rights to Sellers-Garcia’s book at auction from literary agent Dorian Karchmar of the William Morris Agency. Riverhead will publish the title in hardcover in 2007.
