Press release

HARPERCOLLINS CANADA ACQUIRES EMMA DONOGHUE’S NEW NOVEL LEARNED BY HEART

HARPERCOLLINS CANADA ACQUIRES EMMA DONOGHUE’S NEW NOVEL LEARNED BY HEART

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Toronto, August 30, 2022)

HarperCollins Canada is thrilled to have acquired Canada English rights to award-winning, bestselling author Emma Donoghue’s next historical fiction novel, Learned by Heart, set to hit shelves August 2023. The upcoming novel showcases the real-life love story of historical figures Eliza Raine and Anne Lister—Lister’s diaries were the inspiration for the HBO series Gentleman Jack. Senior Vice President and Executive Publisher Iris Tupholme acquired the novel stating, “A new novel from the brilliant Emma Donoghue is always cause for celebration and Learned by Heart is a story readers will love. Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling, and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of secret passion, great love, and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.”

Drawing on Donoghue’s years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805. Emma Donoghue said of the new novel, “I’ve been obsessed with Anne Lister and Eliza Raine for the past three decades, so to be bringing their story to a worldwide audience with my dream team of HarperCollins Canada, Picador, and Little Brown is just fantastic.”

This new novel comes on the heels of a very busy year for Donoghue. Her stage version of Room had its North American premiere in London and Toronto, and the film adaptation of her 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted novel The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh and co-written by Donoghue herself, will screen at TIFF this September, with a release slated later this fall on Netflix. Donoghue’s newest historical novel, Haven, a pressure-cooker survival novel following three monks in 600 AD, went on-sale August 23, 2022, debuting as an instant Canadian bestseller.
Emma Donoghue is represented by Caroline Davidson at CDLA London. The book deal was brokered by Caroline Davidson. Learned by Heart will be co-published by Judith Clain at Little, Brown and Company in the United States, and by Ravi Mirchandani at Picador, UK.

Born in Ireland, national bestselling author EMMA DONOGHUE spent many years in England and now lives in Canada. Her books include Room (basis for the Oscar-nominated film), Slammerkin, and The Pull of the Stars. Her novels have been translated into forty-two languages.

About HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Known worldwide for the quality of its list, HarperCollinsCanada is the proud home of many bestselling authors, including Thomas King, Zoe Whittall, Esi Edugyan, Michelle Good, Heather O’Neill, Lawrence Hill, Kamal Al-Solaylee, Mark Sakamoto, Catherine Hernandez, Emily St. John Mandel, Tracey Lindberg, Tara Westover, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Rachel Cusk, David A. Robertson, Uzma Jalaluddin, Kim Fu, Karen McBride, Jordan Tannahill, Jael Richardson, and Helen Humphreys, among many more found at harpercollins.ca.

HarperCollins Publishers is the second-largest consumer book publisher in the world, with operations in 17 countries. With 200 years of history and more than 120 branded imprints around the world, HarperCollins publishes approximately 10,000 new books every year in 16 languages, and has a print and digital catalogue of more than 200,000 titles. Writing across dozens of genres, HarperCollins authors include winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, and the Booker Prize. HarperCollins, headquartered in New York, is a subsidiary of News Corp (Nasdaq: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) and can be visited online at corporate.HC.com.

Date Posted

August 30, 2022

Author

Lauren Morocco

Subject

HARPERCOLLINS CANADA ACQUIRES EMMA DONOGHUE’S NEW NOVEL LEARNED BY HEART