Publishing Deals - Nick Stafford & Patrick Mercer

Some recent rights deals reported by BookBrunch:

To Charlotte Clerk and Jon Riley at Quercus, world rights in Nick Stafford's first novel ARMISTICE. The novel is about a young soldier's death in the First World War, and about his fiancee's efforts to find out whether he was killed by friendly fire. For publication on Armistice Day 2009; the agent is Clare Conville at Conville & Walsh.

and

To Susan Watt of HarperCollins, a Bernard Cornwell-style trilogy set in the Crimean War. TO DO AND DIE, the first of the trilogy, will be published in 2010 and opens with a regiment embarking for and fighting in the savage battles of what's regarded as the first modern war. Watt believes that "Patrick Mercer's writing takes the reader straight into the heart of battle, with all the courage and the cowardice, and also gives a compelling picture of the soldier's life, the cold, the comradeship, the food and the feuds and the fear of crippling injury or death". Mercer spent 20 years in the Army and commanded a battalion in Bosnia before becoming Today's Defence Correspondent. The MP for Newark and Retford is represented by Natasha Fairweather of A P Watt