Garth Risk Hallberg
City on Fire, the debut novel by American writer Garth Risk Hallberg, will be published in the UK by Jonathan Cape. Film rights for the novel were sold to Scott Rudin who produced Captain Phillips and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

City on Fire is set in New York in the 1970s, and culminates in the evening of the 1977 blackout. The book has split UK publishers, according to The Bookseller magazine. One called it a “game-changer” and “better than Franzen,” while another publisher described it to The Bookseller as “quite patchy” and “very much about New York in the 1970s.”

Natasha Boyd
Eversea, the first in a series of novels by Natasha Boyd about Hollywood film star Jack Eversea, is to be published by Headline Eternal. Eversea goes to sleepy Butler Cove in South Carolina to escape the tabloid glare and his increasingly vapid life. There he meets local girl Keri Ann Butler. Previously self-published, e-book and paperback versions will be published, to be followed by the second book in the series, Forever, Jack, to be published by Headline Eternal this winter.

Melanie Hudson
The Wedding Cake Tree by Melanie Hudson, originally self-published and shortlisted for HarperCollins People’s Novelist of the Year competition, is published by Choc Lit this month in all e-book formats. This is the first time Choc Lit has signed a self-published author.

When failed opera singer turned style photographer, Grace Buchanan, is ordered by her hippy-chick mother to drop everything for two weeks and travel the British Isles with a mysterious stranger – war-weary Royal Marine Officer, Alasdair Finn – she is more than a little surprised. After all, her mother has been dead for six months.

Linda Huber
The Cold Cold Sea, a thriller by Linda Huber, will be published by Legend Press in August. It tells of the disappearance of three-year-old Olivia and deals with the extent to which a parent will go to protect the family. Huber’s debut novel The Paradise Trees was published by Legend Press last September.

Helen Lederer
Losing It, the debut novel from comedienne Helen Lederer [below], will be published in the UK by Pan Macmillan. It is the story of Millie, who has too many pounds around her middle, and not enough pounds in the bank.

Losing it will be published in the spring 2015.

Helena Hunting
Two novels and two ebook shorts by debut New Adult author Helena Hunting will be published by Orion Fiction. Clipped Wings is the love story of two young people who both have darkness in their pasts, it originally appeared online as fan fiction. With the second story, Inked Armor, it received over 27,000 reviews and 2 million hits on fanfiction.net. Clipped Wings will be published in March and Inked Armor in May this year, both in Orion Paperback and e-book. Cupcakes and Ink, the prequel to the Clipped Wings series, will be published as an e-book short this month.