Sadbh's round up of the week's news in the world of books.
Daddy's $1m girl
News that the Taoiseach's youngest daughter, Cecelia (below), had got a €150,000 two-novel deal with Harper Collins got more exciting as the week went on when it turned out the figure was wildly underestimated. It was more like €300,000 - and that was for Britain and Ireland only. By Thursday, her agent, Marianne Gunn O'Connor, had done a $1 million deal with Hyperion for the two books which, for a 21-year-old, takes some beating. Publicity circuits in the US, the sale of foreign language rights all lie ahead.
All of this definitely earns Gunn O'Connor the title of the agent with the Midas touch. Readers will remember the now legendary tale of how she got into the business after the inspired way she launched the career of Niall Williams. Williams, who was a pal of hers at UCD, gave her what he called "a gift I hope will change your life" in 1997 - the manuscript of his novel Four Letters of Love, in a plastic bag.
With marketing acumen acquired from her days in the fashion industry, she hit on the idea of presenting Peter Straus, then of Picador, with the MS in a gold-wrapped box just before he left on a flight to New York. By the next day, he was buying it. Her clients include Patrick McCabe, Claire Kilroy, whose first novel will be published by Faber in May, and Maeve Binchy's nephew, Chris, who she sold on the basis of five chapters within 24 hours in a six-figure deal.
Now 30, and being compared with Tony Parsons, Chris Binchy's first novel, The Very Man, will be published by Macmillan in April. He's now in Annamakerrig writing his second.
Though Gunn O'Connor's base is near Monaghan town "in the middle of a field with no neighbours", she is in London every week when not on the book fair circuit of Frankfurt, London, Guadalajara, New Delhi and the US. Next month, she's moving to new light-filled offices in the Morrison Chambers building at the end of Dawson Street, which becomes more the book quartier of the capital with every day that passes.
Cecelia Ahern, meanwhile, writes popular fiction. Her first novel, PS, I Love You, about twentysomething life in today's Ireland, will be out in spring of next year. The plot revolves around a young woman whose boyfriend dies. All we want to know now is who'll launch it? No better man than Daddy?
Best of British
Is it the exciting prospect of an expanding EU or a broadening of the mind due to globalisation that made last weekend's announcement of the Granta list of 20 Best Young British Novelists seem somehow narrow and chauvinistic in a way that wasn't the case when the list, published every decade, first appeared in 1983.
The 20 prodigals who made it are Monica Ali, Nicola Barker, Rachel Cusk, Susan Elderkin, Philip Hensher, Peter Ho Davies, A.L. Kennedy, Hari Kunzru, Toby Litt, Robert McLiam Wilson, David Mitchell, Andrew O'Hagan, David Peace, Dan Rhodes, Ben Rice, Rachel Sieffert, Zadie Smith, Adam Thirwell, Alan Warner and Sarah Waters. But no sooner had it been announced than the refusnik stories began to emerge.
Claire Messud hadn't the requisite British passport, for instance. Then there was the age barrier. Writers had to be under 40. Andrew Crumey had been a possibility till it was discovered, shock horror, he was 41. Writers such as Warner, O'Hagan and McLiam Wilson, - the first two from a vibrant, devolved Scotland, the third from a radically changed Northern Ireland - stood out on the list. Yes, they've got British passports, are under 40 and their inclusion is justified on literary merit alone, but setting European apart from fellow European on narrow national lines in the 21st century has a dated edge to it.