JULIE BURTON - MacADAM/CAGE

MacAdam/Cage has an incredibly strong fall list – with new fiction by returning favorites Frank Turner Hollon, Craig Clevenger, Kristen den Hartog, and two incredible international debuts from award-winning authors Laurent Gaudé and Guillermo Martinez – but the novel I’m most excited about has to be Victoria Vinton’s The Jungle Law.

This debut novel came to MacAdam/Cage in late February, as it happened, right before I went to New York. We were all really excited about the novel, eager to acquire, and ready to get aggressive knowing how much attention it was sure to generate within other houses. I left not knowing whether or not it would be ours, but hopeful that we would be able to make a deal.

Unsure of its status, I began talking it up to writers and reviewers anyway – and was thrilled when acquiring editor Anika Streitfeld called to say that after a few days worth of negotiations, the novel was ours.

It seems that we, as a house, have not been so universally excited about a project since The Time Traveler’s Wife – a very good sign. Though the two books are worlds apart in terms of style and content, we see the same magic in both. Where Time Traveler drew readers into a most unusual (and powerful) love story, The Jungle Law will pull them into a world of imagination – the rich, vibrant jungle setting Rudyard Kipling envisioned from his small, rural home in Vermont.

Many people are unaware of the fact that Rudyard Kipling lived in Vermont for just over a year, after moving from London in 1892, virtually penniless with his newly pregnant wife. Having fled the literary high life in London, Kipling hoped to find a quiet corner in which to raise a family and work, where he might build a sanctuary that could offer him refuge from the scrutiny incurred by his burgeoning fame and the wounds of his own troubled past.

From this literary footnote, Victoria Vinton brings Kipling’s story – and that of Mowgli, Kaa, Baloo, and Shere Khan – to life. As Kipling writes The Jungle Book he befriends his young neighbor, Joe Connolly, opening the boy’s eyes to a world where Jungle Law reigns supreme. And as Kipling’s stories take root in Joe’s mind, we see a young boy freed from the confines of his dismal life, enlivened by the powerful and unsettling influence of the imagination.

It’s an amazing and powerful work – one we intend to promote as energetically and passionately as we did The Time Traveler’s Wife. We will introduce the author to booksellers and foreign publishers during this June’s Book Expo America, and we will send her on a national tour this fall (she’s already been invited to participate in the increasingly popular First Fiction Tour). The manuscript has been circulated to book reviewers and feature writers, and the early interest is encouraging, to say the least. We know that we’ve found something very special in The Jungle Law.

I hope you’ll agree! Be sure to check out Victoria Vinton’s The Jungle Law in early October, when it’s released in bookstores.