Frankfurt Frenzy Over First Novels

First novels have shouldered aside celebrity autobiographies and misery memoirs to become the talking point of this year's Frankfurt.

Scout Louise Allen Jones said the "hottest book of the fair" so far is Gods Behaving Badly, a surreal satire by British bookseller Marie Phillips. Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape acquired UK and Commonwealth rights on the eve of the fair, saying it was "the best book of that kind I've read since The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time." Four offers are understood to have been received in Italy, with interest in Portugal and Holland.

Faber has snapped up the first novel of poet Owen Sheers from Zoe Waldie at RCW. Nan Talese at Doubleday has US rights, while it has also sold to Holland, Norway and Finland. Resistance is a re-imagining of history set in an alternative 1944, where the Germans occupy Britain.

Another Second World War story making waves is Les Bienveillants, a 900-page novel written in French by the US author Jonathan Litell, the son of thriller writer Robert Littell. "It's the only book that everybody's talking about," said Transworld publisher Bill Scott-Kerr. Suzanne Baboneau, publishing director at Simon & Schuster which is mounting a bid for world English language rights, predicted it would "create a feeding frenzy".

Les Bienveillants has been at number one in France for Gallimard. It is believed to have been sold to Berlin Verlag in Germany, and also won Italian and Dutch deals, but will not be auctioned in the US or UK by Andrew Nurnberg until after the fair.

Eileen Favorite's The Heroines, a debut novel about a guesthouse on an American prairie where a mother and daughter cater to heroines from literature, has sold to Susan Sandon at Random House UK and Nan Graham at Scribner and is seeing "massive European interest", said Caroline Michel of William Morris. "It's a fresh idea and people are really responding to it."

Christopher Little has been seeing "huge interest" in the "dark and intriguing" Messenger of Athens, by Anne Zouroudi, which Bloomsbury is publishing in the UK next June and which has sold into Germany, as well as Holland and Italy.

Pendo in Germany made a "massive six-figure pre-empt" before the fair for Missing Time, a first novel by Danny Scheinmann, sold by Sophie Hicks at Ed Victor. It has also sold to Longanesi in Italy and auctions are ongoing.