Carole Blake is delighted to announce that Dutch rights for Joseph O'Connor's GHOST LIGHT have been sold at auction to Chris Herschdorfer of Ambo | Anthos in Holland. Ambo | Anthos will also republish several of O'Connor's backlist titles. The auction was distinguished by the passionate regard that the participating publishers felt for the manuscript: 5 were bidding. Nelleke Geel of Signatuur was the underbidder.

The novel is a poignant and heartbreaking love story, told through a narrative that moves between London and Ireland in the 1910s, and 1950s Dublin. 

O'Connor has won the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award, the Time Out Macaulay Fellowship of the Irish Arts Council and the Sunday Tribune Short Story Award. His previous novel REDEMPTION FALLS was nominated for the 2007 Prix Femina Etranger and the 2009 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award 2008. STAR OF THE SEA, winner of numerous international awards, was voted as one of 15 'Vintage Future Classics' in 2005, was a Sunday Times No 1 bestseller in paperback and Nielsen Booktrack best-selling adult fiction paperback of the year in 2004, and became the first of the 'Richard & Judy' book club choices to become a superseller. The film rights have been optioned by Parallel Films.

Currently living in America, O'Connor took up the prestigious Harman Visiting Professorship in Creative Writing at Baruch College, City University of New York in the summer of 2009. He follows in the footsteps of Edward Albee, Paul Auster, Anita Desai and many other distinguished writers.

GHOST LIGHT will also be published by Harvill Secker in the UK, Farrar Straus & Giroux in the US, Phebus in France, Fischer in Germany and Guanda in Italy. More sales are expected. His books have been translated into 28 languages.

Praise for Joseph O'Connor:

'Fiction at its very best.' -- Roddy Doyle

'Beautiful writing and heart-breaking sequences...a dazzling narrative.' -- Colm Toibin

'This book took my breath away...a brave book and only a brave heart could have written it.' -- Frank McCourt

'It's a glorious book, enormous, virtuoso and brave. The minute I finished the book I wanted to start reading it all over again.' -- Colum McCann

'Compelling characters and a dizzying narrative.' -- Sunday Times

'O'Connor has cemented his place as a kind of post-modern Charles Dickens.' -- Irish Daily

'Better than perfect...It has that elusive quality which is the distinctive feature of great literature...O'Connor has broken the mould of Irish fiction. Where he goes from here is beyond me.' -- Peter Van de Kamp, The Sunday Independent

'A narrative...rich with a medley of languages, dialects and clashing cultural mores. The novel is complex [and] ambitious.' -- Publishers Weekly

'This virtuoso and overwhelming novel.' -- Het Parool

'Among the most compelling representatives of contemporary north-European literature.' -- Il Corriere della Sera

'Every word is glistening.  Mystical from the beginning until the end, noble with an exhilarating end.' -- Bild am Sonntag