How Two Good Men came to Salt

Every so often a manuscript arrives that rearranges your week. Two Good Men did that to mine.

I'd known Emma Henderson's work for years – her remarkable debut Grace Williams Says It Loud (Sceptre, 2010) won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and The Valentine House (Sceptre, 2017) was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize – so when Veronique Baxter at David Higham wrote to ask whether we might like to read a new novel, I cleared an afternoon. I didn't get up again until I'd finished it.

Sofia Lambert is ninety-six. She has dementia – or so the staff at Einheim, the celebrated dementia village near Maastricht that Sofia herself founded, are quite certain. In secret, Sofia is writing. She has a story to tell, and she is running out of time. Born to an undocumented Belgian chambermaid, Sofia grew up across the railways and borders of interwar Europe. She became a wartime censor, an interpreter at Potsdam and at the signing of the Treaties of Rome – and, for forty years, the lover of two remarkable men. One English, one German. Both pacifists. Neither, perhaps, quite what he seemed.

What undid me is the voice. Sofia Lambert is funny, acerbic, sexually frank, frequently scandalous, and entirely her own. She is the kind of fictional narrator one encounters perhaps two or three times in a publishing life: a voice that arrives fully formed, with the authority of someone who knows precisely what she has done and is not particularly inclined to apologise for any of it. The novel moves across the twentieth century without ever feeling like a tour of it. The century is the weather; Sofia is the storm.

It is also a love story – or rather, the love story of a woman who declined to choose. There is much in Two Good Men about the architecture of long affection: the practical comedy of it, the secrecies, the costs, the strange durabilities. And it asks, with real seriousness but never solemnly, what pacifism meant in the European twentieth century, and what it asked of the people who tried to live by it.

We acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Veronique Baxter at David Higham Associates. Two Good Men will publish on 12 April 2027 as a B-format paperback original at £12.99, with eBook to follow through Faber Factory and Bookwire. Kirsty is already plotting the campaign. The Cover Factory have completed work on the jacket. We'll bring it to PGUK reps in the new year, and the novel will lead our literary list for spring 2027.

Emma's response when we made the offer was characteristically generous:

'I have admired Salt for as long as I can remember; I am chuffed beyond words that my Two Good Men will be published by them.'

The feeling is entirely mutual. Two Good Men is a masterpiece, and we could not be prouder to be its publisher. I think Sofia Lambert is going to find a great many readers, and I think she will boss them about thoroughly when she does.

Watch this space.