In a year or so, we'll have some utterly mind-blowing books to read, judging from some of the recently announced book deals. Here are some of the newly announced book deals that we're excited about!


The Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins. Sold to the UK's Gollancz, this debut novel takes place in an "alternative Stalinist Russia," where different timelines and alternate futures are intersecting. It's full of all the usual Darkness at Noon stuff, including one-party rule, secret police and gulags — but with golems, giants, medical experiments and ancient artifacts in the mix. People who've read it tell us that it's full of insane images and clever ideas — here's hoping it gets a U.S. book deal soon.

Version Control by Dexer Palmer. The author of The Dream of Perpetual Motion recently sold his follow-up novel, and it sounds like a more fucked-up version of The Time Traveler's Wife. It's about a woman who's married to a physicist, and his experiments have "unintended consequences," which alter both the nature of their marriage and the nature of reality itself. Sold to Pantheon Books.


A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins. Hutchinks a Truman Capote fellow in the the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, sold this novel to Penguin at auction. It's about a San Francisco man who turns his dead father's journals into a sentient computer — while at the same time, sifting through the wreckage of his past relationships and groping towards a new type of love. It's described as being both moving and "laugh-out-loud funny."

Homeland, Marcus by Cory Doctorow. Yep, it's another book about the hero of Little Brother, who totally deserves another outing. This time, he's caught up in a new crisis, involving "student loans, leaks of political secrets, and homeland security." Sounds like it'll probably still be topical when it comes out in 2013, unfortunately. This was sold to Tor's Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

All deals via Publishers Marketplace's Deals Page (Login required.)