Ben Ball acquires new book from Delia Falconer for Scribner Australia

Scribner Australia is delighted to announce the acquisition of ANZ rights in Delia Falconer’s new book, Signs and Wonders, from Jane Novak at the Jane Novak Literary Agency. 

Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’ (both published in the Sydney Review of Books), this is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. 

In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a lover of nature and mother of small children in an era of ecological collapse. Scientists write about a “great acceleration” in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful.  Ranging from meditations on how writers, including herself, are coping with a loss of natural abundance to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment and the ways we are writing and thinking about bees, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.  

Ben Ball, Publishing Director of Scribner, says: ‘We know Delia as one of our finest prose stylists from her three books, and one of our most insightful critics from her ongoing journalism. The reason Scribner will put this book at the front of all our publishing endeavours for 2021 is that it will unite those qualities in service of a fresh, urgent line of inquiry. A powerhouse intellect and artist, Delia helps us see what is around us and what it ahead of us. Signs and Wonders will be a major contribution to Australian writing as well as to our thinking about our future.’

Scribner will publish in late 2021.