Conville & Walsh

Andrea Wulf takes her book proposal to New York… Last year, I went to the Appalachian Mountains and the Catskills to research my second book, THE BROTHER GARDENERS: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession (to be published by William Heinemann in April 2008). It tells the story of the six men who created the craze for botany and gardening which overtook the public imagination in late eighteenth-century England. I had come to America equipped with the letters and journals of one of the book’s protagonists, an extraordinary American named John Bartram, a self-educated plant collector who began his life as a humble farmer and died as the King’s botanist. And while following Bartram’s footsteps through forests of towering trees and along precipitous mountain paths, I came up with the nucleus of a new book idea – about the American wilderness and the shaping of the nation during the American Revolution. My agent Patrick Walsh loved the idea so much that I ended up writing a 90-page proposal in the midst of the edit of THE BROTHER GARDENERS.

When I finished, I thought I deserved a break and planned a few relaxing days in New York – in celebration of both the completion of THE BROTHER GARDENERS and my proposal. I wanted to visit a few friends, go out and do some shopping. But Patrick had other ideas. When he heard of my trip, he got on a plane himself and began hand-delivering my proposal to some twenty editors. By the time I arrived a couple of days later, I had appointments with nine of them. I never entered a shop; instead, I traipsed from early breakfast on the Upper West Side to drinks on Union Square. Some of the publishers were a bit bemused because British books are almost never hand-sold by the agent and the author together. But the strategy seemed to work: within a couple of days I’d had six offers, and the deal was concluded within a week.

Sanjida O’Connell talks about the writing of her new novel, which has just been sold to John Murray: ‘THE NAKED NAME OF LOVE is set just after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. The story takes place in Outer Mongolia where the Jesuit priest Father Joseph Jacob travels in search of rare fauna and flora. He hopes to make his name in the scientific community, but instead he meets and falls in love with a beautiful tribeswoman called Namuunna, who hunts with an eagle and a wolf. I travelled to Mongolia to carry out some of the research for the book. The journey didn’t start well: my luggage ended up in Moscow. For some reason I was wearing combat trousers and walking boots on the plane so at least I didn’t have to travel across the Gobi in a Juicy Cutoure tracksuit and high-heeled boots. Being vegetarian, I didn’t actually eat any marmot or yak butter tea but had lots of tinned peas instead. We broke down in a town called Moron (actually, the pilot of the plane got very drunk and we had to wait for him to sober up). After spending two weeks on horseback and in the back of a Land Rover without much suspension, it hurt to sit down for a year afterwards. Still, Mongolia is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever visited even if it meant wincing slightly every time I sat in front of my computer.’