“Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. ”
James A. Baldwin
Literary Agency
MATCHED trilogy by Ally Condie:
GERMAN rights sold to FISCHER in a pre-emptive deal
ITALIAN rights sold to FAZI in a pre-emptive deal
BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE rights sold to OBJECTIVA
We’ve gotten such an amazing response from you and from all the publishers who have quickly fallen in love with this trilogy – thank you! It’s a remarkable series and I look forward to many more foreign sales to come. So far, we have multiple offers in from France and Spain as well as offers from Greece, Israel, and Russia.
I’ll continue to keep you updated!
Very best,
Cecilia
I’m very excited to tell you about a new trilogy called MATCHED by Allie Condie.
Jodi Reamer just sold the US rights to this series in a very hard fought 6-publisher auction, where Penguin was the winner. That announcement will be made sometime this week, but we’ve been getting so much interest that I wanted to submit the material right away for foreign publishers. Please note that the attached manuscript is totally unedited – but you’ll see that the skill of Ally’s writing and the ingenious world she’s created are enough to enthrall any reader. One of the publishers involved in the bidding war for the US rights said that MATCHED was the best thing she’s read in the past 3 years and she compared the writing to “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of “Remains of the Day”).
MATCHED is an amazing debut, from essentially a first time author, that combines the eloquence and dystopian setting of Lois Lowry's "The Giver," the passion of "Twilight" and the game theory of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game." Truly remarkable.
It’s almost best not to know ahead of time what might unfold…
The novel opens with The Match Banquet, something seventeen-year-old Calla Reyes has looked forward to for years. It’s the night she’ll discover who the Society has selected as her ideal mate. The Society matches its youth based on data collected through their lives; and while it doesn’t claim that everyone lives happily ever after, it does guarantee that most will come close.
It is on this eagerly anticipated night, however, that Calla begins to discover that everything might not be as it seems. If the Society is truly as close to perfect as possible, why does Calla discover an error in her Match immediately following the Banquet? She also can’t explain what’s happening to her mother at work, or decide what to do with the mysterious and dangerous lines from the poem that she finds in an artifact from the past. And Calla must answer the most difficult question of all: If the Society knows best, then why is she falling in love with someone else—someone forbidden—someone who is not her Match?
Jodi’s description of MATCHED was “I haven’t been this excited by a new manuscript since ‘Twilight’ appeared in my slush pile. And clearly other agents were just as moved since I had to win her over from other offers of representation.” I think you’ll be as amazed as we were that this is Ally Condie’s first mainstream novel (she’s previously published several books with the LDS publisher, Deseret Book Company); she’s an extraordinary new talent and I hope you all find MATCHED as captivating and exhilarating a read as we did.
