New Regency has acquired the film and television rights to Meg Mason’s latest novel, Sorrow and Bliss, in a competitive auction. Casarotto Ramsay and HarperCollins Australia brokered the deal.
Sorrow and Bliss is a compulsively readable novel – spiky, sharp, intriguingly dark, and tender – about a woman trying to make sense of the mental illness that’s plagued her for decades, combining the psychological insight of Sally Rooney with the sharp humour of Nina Stibbe and the emotional resonance of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.
“How can something so hilarious move the reader to tears? How can such a sad story make one laugh so much? Meg Mason pulls off this brilliant feat in Sorrow and Bliss. Everyone who has read this at Harper has fallen in love with Meg Mason’s fierce, tricky, funny heroine, and we are all deeply proud to be publishing this amazing novel,” commented President and Publisher, Harper Division, HarperCollins US, Jonathan Burnham.
Sorrow and Bliss was published by HarperCollins in Australia and New Zealand in September 2020 and will be published across 21 countries and 16 translation territories including in the US and the UK after hotly contested auctions.
Meg Mason began her career at The Financial Times and The Times of London. Her work has since appeared in The Sunday Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written humour for The New Yorker and Sunday STYLE, a monthly column for GQ, and was a regular contributor to Vogue, ELLE and Marie Claire, before turning to fiction full-time.
Her first book Say It Again in a Nice Voice (HarperCollins), a memoir of early motherhood, was published in 2012. Her novel You Be Mother (HarperCollins) followed in 2017.
