Month: September 2026

Autumn season has begun, and with it, foreign rights sales are rolling! My Therapist is a Werewolf, this autumn’s most anticipated novel on the HLA list, written by Juhani Karila, starts its journey abroad with 3 foreign rights sales.

My Therapist is a Werewolf introduces us to a whole new array of odd creatures, but the people in it a recognisably loveable, helpless, and funny without often meaning to be so. This time, the setting is fantastical Helsinki, where the main character, Eve, struggles with her relationship and unresolved traumas, talks about her problems with a large, sharp-toothed werewolf, and plays table tennis a lot.

The novel is a story about mental health, us and them, and the literal and figurative spins life throws at you. Therapy led by a werewolf is unpredictable, but help rarely arrives in the shape you were expecting.

Frankfurt Book Fair is starting next week, so more deals are expected soon – stay tuned!

Congratulations to the author and his publishers!

Fig Tree Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, has secured the World English rights to He Who Saw The Deep by Selja Ahava, marking the fourth foreign deal for this title.

A wonderful beginning of autumn for our author Selja Ahava, who’s 2025 novel He Who Saw The Deep continues its journey out into the world: Fig Tree Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, has secured the World English rights to this title.

Acquiring editor Ella Harold has stated: “I’m incredibly excited about He Who Saw The Deep, and the prospect of publishing Selja Ahava’s remarkable new novel at Fig Tree. It’s a wonderful novel: mesmerising, ambitious, and deeply humane, so broad in its sources of inspiration, but so compelling and readable.” In her vision, He Who Saw The Deep can be placed on the shelves of readers of Jon Fosse, Annie Ernaux, Solvej Balle, and especially Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, and Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World, in which, much like in He Who Saw The Deep, the literary whole consists of a mosaic of literary, cultural, and scientific references.

Fig Tree is an imprint with a sharp and ambitious eye for translated fiction. Under its roof, Ahava joins the ranks of Swedish author Andrev Walden and his bestselling, August Prize-winning novel, Bloody Awful in Different Ways (Jävla Karlar), and Martina Hefter, and her Deutscher Buchpreis-winning novel Hey, Good Morning. Fig Tree is also home for Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon and I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan.

In He Who Saw the Deep, award-winning author Selja Ahava writes about two of the most human feelings: love and fear of death. Liisa is a middle-aged woman in whose family people seldom live to old age. When she meets the love of her life, it is evident that their time together is limited. When her only living older relative falls deathly ill, Liisa is forced to grapple with the inevitability of death, and she begins to collect and write stories that give her a chance to explore the idea of mortality and the pursuit of immortality. The stories follow situations where the line between life and death, the dead and the living, is walked, observed, and redrawn. The fragments of stories are weaved together, resulting in a modern rhapsody held together by Liisa’s own story. The book is published in Finland by Gummerus, and has already travelled to Denmark, Hungary, and Poland.

Selja Ahava (b. 1974), author and dramaturg, is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Finnish fiction. Her second novel, Things that Fall from the Sky (2015), is a winner of the European Union Prize for Literature 2016, and a nominee of the Finlandia Prize and the Torch-bearer Prize; foreign rights of this novel have been sold to 28 territories.

Congratulations to the author for this wonderful deal!