Jon Courtenay Grimwood signs two-book Historical Fantasy deal with Transworld (Heaven immediately looks nervous) (news)

Transworld UK has pre-emptively acquired two new historical fantasy novels from bestselling author Jon Courtenay Grimwood, which is a sentence that already sounds as if it should be accompanied by thunder, wax seals, and an angel with litigation issues.

The deal, struck by Transworld’s Simon Taylor with agent John Jarrold, covers world rights for two books. The first is Thrones and Powers, a historical fantasy that appears to begin with Joan of Arc, pass through immortality, swerve into Mexico City, and then park itself directly outside Heaven’s complaints department.

The novel opens in the long shadow of 30 May 1431, when Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, was burned at the stake as a heretic at the age of 19. Looking on in despair is Gilles de Rais, a young French noble and one of her followers. History, never exactly shy about throwing people into the moral oubliette and locking the lid, later remembers Gilles as a monster and the supposed inspiration for Bluebeard.

Grimwood’s version, however, has rather more mileage on the clock. Betrayed and condemned to immortality after Joan’s death, Gilles survives into the modern age as Professor Don Gil de Ray, a historian of medieval France living quietly in Mexico City. Naturally, because this is the sort of book where “quietly” is a word fate circles in red ink, Don Gil’s life is interrupted when he is attacked in New York by an angel demanding his obedience.

Heaven, it turns out, has a problem. It wants Don Gil to discover what has happened to God.

Don Gil, being immortal, traumatised, furious, and apparently not on speaking terms with the upper management, refuses. He has no interest in God, alive or otherwise, and no desire to return to Heaven unless it somehow allows him to follow Joan through her future incarnations and try once more to save her soul. This is, one suspects, not the kind of protagonist who can be placated with a harp and a biscuit.

Then Lucifer makes him an offer. And when Lucifer starts making offers, even the small print tends to have talons.

The second book in the deal is currently untitled, presumably because “another large historical fantasy headache for theologians” has not yet cleared marketing.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood has been a familiar and distinctive presence across science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, and thrillers for years. His Ashraf Bey novel Felaheen won the BSFA Award for Best Novel, as did The End of the World Blues. Writing as Jack Grimwood, he also found major success with the Tom Fox thrillers, including Moskva, Nightfall Berlin, Island Reich, and Arctic Sun. The man does not so much change lanes as redesign the road system while pursued by spies, ghosts, and award committees.

Grimwood said he was “absolutely thrilled” to be working with Simon Taylor at Transworld, adding that Thrones is a book that “really matters” to him. John Jarrold noted that Taylor was in touch within hours of Grimwood joining the agency, which suggests the publishing world can move at speed when sufficiently tempted by Joan of Arc, Lucifer, and a missing deity.

Taylor, meanwhile, described Thrones and Powers as “genre-defying, boundary-pushing, ideas-filled and hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck-raisingly-exciting,” calling it the novel of “a writer at the peak of his powers.”

Here at SFcrowsnest, we approve of any book in which Heaven has lost track of God and must outsource the investigation to an immortal medieval Frenchman who would rather not take the call. That is not just a premise. That is a theological filing cabinet exploding in a cathedral.