City of Blok
William Collins & Sons 1988
Flamingo paperback 1989
CITY OF BLOK was supposed to be my third novel for Heinemann and was
part of a two-book deal with THE DEATH OF MOISHE-GANEF. However, by
the time I had completed the novel, the publishing company was in the
throes of one of those life-and-death corporate makeovers which involved
the sacking of most of the senior staff. My own editor at the house,
who was too junior to sack, took fright at the narrative and turned
it down, then vanished promptly on maternity leave. All seemed lost,
and the manuscript began a long and melancholy trudge from one publisher
to another both in Britain and the USA, where it had been taken on
temporarily by a top agent, Candida Donadio, who was famed as the discoverer
of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, and was the agent for Thomas Pynchon
and Mario Puzo, among many. She was an acquaintance of my ex-publisher-cum-agent
Tim O’Keeffe and had taken me on after writing him that she had
seen him in a dream in the guise of an Irish leprechaun. This vision
did not in the end suffice me much, as she soon retired, leaving me
agentless in New York, with a sheaf of dispiriting rejections. Fortune
and O’Keeffe triumphed again, however, when he managed to place
me with a senior editor at William Collins, Britain’s most venerable
publishers. So Blok could be relaunched…
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