Tom Wolfe to Publish New Novel Set in Miami, Back to Blood

Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group USA, announced today that the company has acquired rights to publish the new novel by Tom Wolfe, the celebrated bestselling novelist and journalist, author of such American classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and most recently I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Titled Back to Blood, the novel will consider class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first. Characters include a young nurse of Cuban ancestry married to a famous French-emigre sex doctor, a freshman journalist on the trail of a Russian-mob-comes-to-Miami story, his wary editor, a second-generation Cuban police officer, a woman of Haitian background who passes for Anglo, and dozens more.

Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch said, "The opportunity to work with the American master Tom Wolfe is the kind of thrill and challenge that people entering book publishing dream of. I picked The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby off a library spinner rack in nineteen sixty- something and it tore the top of my head off-I'd never imagined a writer's voice could be that alive on the page. Everyone at Little, Brown is exhilarated to be working with Tom Wolfe to bring his new novel to readers in the Internet age."

David Young, CEO of Hachette Book Group USA, said, "Tom Wolfe is one of a kind, a master craftsman and social observer and comic writer of the highest caliber. I am thrilled to bring the many assets of the Hachette Book Group, publishers of great literary fiction and of enormous bestsellers, to bear in helping Tom Wolfe find the biggest readership of his already extraordinary career."

Mr. Wolfe was represented in the negotiation by his longtime agent, Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit. The book will be edited by Little, Brown senior editor Pat Strachan. Ms. Strachan was formerly Mr. Wolfe's editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she worked with him on The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and four other books. Little, Brown acquired North American rights, and publication is planned for 2009.

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group USA. Founded in 1837, Little, Brown has long been recognized as a publisher committed to publishing fiction of the highest quality and nonfiction of lasting significance. Hachette Book Group USA is a leading trade publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the second-largest publisher in the world.

SOURCE Little, Brown and Company