Pontas has become the literary agency of Jacqueline Remmers and we are happy to be submitting her debut novel A CHANCE OF A LIFETIME, written originally in English language. We are convinced that it has a strong commercial potential and we really believe this could have a space in many international catalogues and become a film!
About the novel:
A CHANCE OF A LIFETIME is about a woman in her early thirties, Anne Miller, who lives in London with her stuck-up and controlling boyfriend Ian. She works for a magazine named Shout! and she harbours dreams of advancing herself as a journalist. This despite constant discouragement from Ian, who works for the government, is a terrible social climber, and who would prefer to have an ornamental partner rather than an independent one.
Anne is sent to do a press junket with Rory Maquary, a former singer-turned-actor, and unexpectedly it turns out that she and Rory’s troubled four-year-old son Rowland have an instant click.
Later that evening, Anne’s big chance comes when she receives a telephone call asking her if she would be willing to drop everything and join the reunion tour of Road Rage, Rory’s old band. She would be there in the capacity of Rowland’s nanny (his official nanny has quit abruptly due to Rowland’s frequent and uncontrollable anxiety attacks), but in return she will have exclusive rights to write an in-depth article for Shout! that documents music history as the world famous band gets together again.
This is her chance, and she takes it.
Suddenly Anne finds herself in a world that she does not know and that at first frightens her, but as the weeks progress she gets to know the members of the band and she has to admit that she has been terribly prejudiced. They are without exception very different from what their public profile suggests, and Rory most of all. To her surprise and confusion she finds the embarrassing attraction she at first felt for him growing into something more profound. Her feelings are reciprocated, and before long, it is impossible to ignore or deny them.
After three weeks though the adventure ends for Anne, when she is supposed to go home again. But when she tries to go back to her old life she discovers the experience has profoundly changed her and she does not fit in any more. She has to concede that appearances are deceiving to the extent that even she herself is in fact quite different from what she had always thought.
She belongs with Rory and Row, if they will still have her…
About Jacqueline Remmers (by herself):
“I was born in 1968 in Amsterdam, went to school there and studied Dutch and English linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. I joined my first band when I was 15 or thereabouts. At the moment I am a proud member of Half on Signature, the international publishers band.
I have worked in publishing all my working life. My first employer was a business publisher who produced reference works about passports and bank notes. I started there as an editor on the passport books, then eventually became head of the entire editorial department, developed a trade journal for the international identity security field, and was part of an international working group for identity security for IATA, under UN auspices. Later on, I was R&D manager and developed software solutions for clients in the commercial field who had to deal with passport security.
Then, I moved into general publishing as the acquiring editor for Luitingh, one of the largest commercial fiction/thriller lists in The Netherlands. I have been there for 5 years now.
As time has progressed, my interest for new media has propelled me into developing an online readers community for The Netherlands and Flanders, which has within its year of launch has become the largest book community online, and in terms of membership the most successful online enterprise within our group. It is still growing.
Also, I am managing a comprehensive database of book metadata, which is the engine behind all web shops in our group as well as a large amount of public sites.
I still publish thrillers as well”.
Submissions: anna@pontas-agency.com
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About Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa:
“A unique literary experience not to be missed” – Hanan Ashrawi
“A powerful and heartbreaking book” – Esther Freud
About The Centenarian Who Climbed Out Through the Window and Vanished, by Jonas Jonasson
“A charming Forrest Gump kind of story. An incredibly funny book that fills you with joy and laughter.” – Monica Bengtsson
About Happiness, by Lluís-Anton Baulenas
“Like Balzac and Zola with Paris, Baulenas takes us back to the city of Barcelona just before the big changes of the fin de siècle take place” – HP/De Tijd
About Cristina Sánchez-Andrade:
“Something radically new in Spanish literature, original and unusual” – Manuel Rivas
About Everything Has A Price, by Neus Arqués:
“We want more. Neus Arqués novels always leave you with this same feeling” – Carolina González
    
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Born in Italy, as a child Walter Riso emigrated with his parents to Argentina and later settled in Colombia. Riso is a psychologist with extensive professional training and academic experience.
Walter Riso has hit on a way of explaining, in simple and direct language, and therefore much more effectively, the main problems that hinder people from living their lives fully and having balanced and satisfactory relationships. His books confront the most anguishing questions in a natural way, and in them readers find the help they need to change their lives, increase their quality of living, and live better. Books of psychology written for the layman in which the author presents problems and offers suggestions, informed by years of professional experience and an acute sensibility for perceiving the nature of difficulties and their solutions.
In recent years, Riso’s work, published by Grupo Editorial Norma in Argentina and by Zenith/Planeta in Spain, has sold 1,7 million copies. His work has also been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Greek and Portuguese in Portugal and Brazil. And now he will be published in Chinese as well. He writes in Spanish and lives between Bogotá and Barcelona.
Translation rights handled by Pontas.
  
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We are glad to annouce that Pontas has become the literary agency of Nazli Ghassemi and we are happy to be sending the first submissions of her debut novel Poetess in Dubai, written originally in English language, thinking that this could find a space in good catalogues around the world, besides being adapted into a film or a tv series.
About Poetess in Dubai
Maya Olivia Bibnaz Rostampisheh-Williams, a single, thirty-nine-year-old American expatriate, has been drifted.to Dubai, the flamboyant hub of the Inshallah region, better known as the Middle East. Maya sheds a humorous light on life in the region through the adventures that she and her friends experience while searching for love in Dubai.
We get an insider’s view of the daily lives of Maya and her entourage: Janet, a thirty-three-year-old American globetrotter, who is becoming increasingly Arabized; Asif, a gay British-Pakistani man in his mid-thirties who has just tied the knot, Michelle, a hot Lebanese in her twenties, who enjoys her men and her family back in Beirut. And Mark Clover, an American newcomer to the region, who Maya is falling in love with, slowly but surely. They take us from the mall’s ski slopes, to Elton John in Abu Dhabi, art galleries in the middle of industrial areas, beaches at the Persian Gulf, and even to Iran’s free zone Island of Kish across the Gulf.
About the author:
Nazli Ghassemi was born in Iran where she finished middle school. She grew up in Europe and America and has travelled extensively. After studying Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, she worked variously as a dance instructor, hotel receptionist, businesswoman, translator, a ghost writer, and teacher.
Her travels took her back to Iran, where she worked for a few years before moving to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she currently resides. Turning her cross-cultural experiences into humorous novels has been her dream.
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Remember this name: Cristina Sánchez-Andrade. She is, without question, one of the most powerful female voices the Spanish literature has produced. As Manuel Rivas said: “Something radically new in Spanish literature, original and unusual”.
 
Her new novel, Los escarpines de Kristina de Noruega (that in English we have transformed into The Secret of Kristina of Norway), has just been published by Roca Editorial.
The synopsis:
13th century. The Reconquest is at its very peak. A plague of lobsters devastates Castille and a woman, in front of the pain labor, stops her horse in the inhospitable moors of Toledo. Before giving birth, she makes something strange: she buries her beautiful bed socks and their hidden secret with them. The woman is Beatriz de Suabia and the child coming to the world is the future Alfonso X The Wise. Next to Beatriz there is her mother-in-low, Berenguela La Grande, the most influential woman on the future king, for which she has planned a glorious fate: turn him into the emperor of the Sacrum Roman Empire. Years later, when princess Kristina of Norway arrives to Castille to marry Alfonso, she will have the bed socks in her hands. But how this could be possible? And above all, which is the mystery they hold?
Taking advantage of these true events, passionate and nearly unknown episodes of the history of the Spanish and Norwegian 13th century, Cristina Sánchez-Andrade builds a novel that becomes a touching and surprising fable.
The media coverage has been important in the last weeks and it´s just the beginning. One of the articles appeared here and another here.
Translation and film rights are available at the Pontas Agency.
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We are glad to announce that Pontas is the new literary agency representing internationally Portuguese author Margarida Rebelo Pinto .
 
Margarida Rebelo Pinto is one of the most popular Portuguese writers, with more than one million copies sold in Portugal so far. Her work has been translated into several languages.
Pontas has recently sold the German rights of her latest novel, Portugues Suave to Blanvalet (Random House).
What’s Portugues Suave about?
In the 40’s, Mercês Perestrello was moved away from her children because of her alleged insanity. In the 60’s, the twins Maria Teresa and Maria Luísa choose different lives in their search of happiness. Forty years later, cousins Leonor and Naná reveal unimaginable secrets. Written in first person through different voices, this novel shows three periods of the recent Portuguese history from the point of view of three generations of women of the same family, determined by the traditional bourgeoisie of a country where “something not said is something non-existent”.
Three generations of women face up to light customs, but only the last one finds out the truth.
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Three very different books by different authors, yet very strong women from Palestine, United States (with Lebanese and Indian origins) and Catalonia, will reach new audiences in more languages soon.
 
After having been sold into 20 languages, Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa will be also published in Thailand by Sanskrit Book and Bosnia by Bookline.
Maha Akhtar´s new book, The Lost Princess, written in English, has been sold to Roca Editorial to be first published in Spanish language, as it happened with her previous and bestselling book The Maharani’s Granddaugther.
  
Behind the Walls, by Núria Esponellà, is in its fourth reprint in Catalan since it was published at the end of 2009 and it has just been published in Spanish by Roca Editorial. Norwegian rights have been sold to Juritzen Forlag.
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During the Cannes Film Market 2010, Carina Brandt and Anna Soler-Pont, from the Pontas team, together with American film director Brett Wagner had the chance to attend the screening of Happythankyoumoreplease: written, directed and starring Josh Radnor (CBS’s How I Met Your Mother).
And a few days later, after a series of happy coincidences, Josh Radnor visited the Pontas offices in Barcelona and spent some time with the Pontas team discovering the city for the first time. In the pictures, with Carina Brandt, Anna Ascolies and Anna Soler-Pont.
  
Happythankyoumoreplease won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival 2010 and it will be released in the USA next August. The film co-stars Josh Radnor, Malin Akerman, Kate Mara, Zoe Kazan, Michael Algieri and Tony Hale, and tells the story of a group of young New Yorkers struggling to balance love, friendship and their approaching adulthoods. Myriad Pictures bought the international distribution rights for the film.
Josh Radnor is talking about his debut film here.
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The 21st edition of the French literary and film festival “Étonnants Voyageurs” took place in Saint Malo, Brittany, from May 22 to 24, 2010. More than 200 writers and filmmakers from 35 countries got together with publishers, book sellers and a passionated audience in that special city around pannels, discussions, exhibitions, films… While Russia, with an impressive line-up of authors and films was the guest of honor, Haitian writers played the starring role.
Anna Soler-Pont and Marc de Gouvenain from the Pontas team attended the festival and reinforced the international networking.
 
A special TGV train left Paris on Saturday May 21st with most of the participants on board and then returned from Saint Malo on Monday 24th. In the pictures, Anna with French actress Ariane Ascaride (amazing in all Robert Guédiguian’s films such as Marius et Jeannette); and Philippe Matsas, Alain Claret and Ingrid Astier.
 
Writer and musician Wilfried N’Sondé with Marc de Gouvenain; and journalist and writer Fanny Germain with Anna.
 
Asha Miró and Anna Soler-Pont launched the French edition of their novel, Traces de Santal (published by Éditions Buchet Chastel). In the pictures, with their publisher Marc Parent; and with Portuguese author represented by Pontas Tania Ganho.
 
All the authors and staff of the French Groupe Libella were invited to the Fort National for a drink and Atlantic sea fruits by the owner of that wonderful house of XVII century in an island just in front of Saint Malo in walking or swimming distance (depending on the tides!).
  
Among others, Danish author Carsten Jensen; Indian author Tarun Jit Tejpal; Spanish author Ignacio del Valle; French publisher Daniel Arsand from Éditions Phébus; Canadian author Taras Grescoe; and British author John Dickie.
  
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Anna Soler-Pont, Carina Brandt and Marc de Gouvenain attended the Marché du Film of the Festival de Cannes 2010 having meetings at the Pontas stand at the Palais and all around Cannes: hotels, terraces by the beach or in penthouses, yachts, restaurants, appartments, cafés… A very busy and intensive schedule like everyone else working there!
Pontas is now a production company based in Barcelona developing and packaging film projects; an international film sales agency handling world rights for feature films and documentaries with focus on cross-cultural plots; and is also a literary agency (since 1992) actively selling film rights of books with adaptation possibilities.
  
In the picture, from left to right: Anna Soler-Pont, Carina Brandt, Brett Wagner and Marc de Gouvenain.
We had the opportunity to meet with Palestinian film director Annemarie Jacir (in the picture with Anna and Lucas Rosant).
The Film Market organised a wonderful party at the Majestic Beach.
Anna Soler-Pont was invited at the opening gala of the Festival conducted by Kristin Scott-Thomas, introducing the great jury (with Tim Burton as president) and with the world première of Robin Hood (with Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett). Anna had the chance to shake hands with Russell Crowe again although the Maori project with Alan Duff never happened…
 
An article published in Screen Daily summarized part of the Pontas activity at the Cannes Film Market 2010.
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