Sold in 20 countries within four weeks, Le Monde de Noé is the latest proof point for City Éditions’ strategy of pairing selective list-building with an increasingly close partnership with agency BAM.

By Eric Dupuy, Contributor

Normandy-based City Éditions is having a summer few French independent publishers can match. Le Monde de Noé, written under the pen name Pierre Antoine—a byline for a journalist and author previously published in a different register—has been acquired in 20 territories in just four weeks, with a path to roughly 30 deals considered realistic by the agents handling the rights. For comparison, the widely cited French rights phenomenon La Tresse (The Braid) closed 27 deals.

The novel follows Lisa, a 56-year-old Paris taxi driver and former history teacher, and her 17-year-old nephew Noé, diagnosed with an incurable lymphoma, across 35 stops spanning world history — from the Venus of Lespugue to Martin Luther King Park — over a single night, from 8 p.m. to dawn. City will publish the book in France on November 4, 2026, backing it with what founder Frédéric Thibaud describes as one of the house’s largest launches of the year outside its Frieda McFadden titles: transit and station advertising, a press launch event at an emblematic Paris venue, and a dedicated social and influencer campaign.

A Publisher Built on Discipline, Not Volume

The deal’s scale is best understood against City’s recent financial trajectory. Driven largely by Frieda McFadden—whose French sales reached 6.9 million copies in 2025, or 2.2% of the French book market, making France her second-largest market worldwide after the United States—City posted revenue of €36.214 million (roughly $42 million) in 2025, up 203.9% year-on-year, with net income of €14.615 million ($16.8 million) and a headcount of just 14 employees. Rather than scale up McFadden’s output, Thibaud has kept the author to three titles a year out of roughly 50 novels published annually, while developing satellite imprints under controlled growth: romance label Eden, and the new graphic-novel imprint Imagine Graphic, which will adapt several McFadden bestsellers starting in 2026.

That discipline predates McFadden. City had already built commercial momentum by launching French authors who went on to major success, notably Virginie Grimaldi, and through targeted foreign acquisitions such as British author Anna Stuart (The Midwife of Auschwitz). The McFadden windfall gave City the scale to deepen its relationship with literary agency BAM, with which it began actively collaborating on thriller titles earlier this year. Le Monde de Noé is the first major success of that partnership — and, according to agents Marie Lannurien and Sophie Langlais, one scouts describe as unlike anything seen in the market in a decade or more.

Speed and Depth of the Auctions

BAM sent foreign publishers a partial manuscript—seven chapters, roughly a quarter of the novel—alongside a synopsis. Spain’s Planeta preempted the rights four hours after receiving the material. Germany drew 11 competing publishers before DTV secured the rights; Italy saw six houses in contention, with Rizzoli prevailing; South Korea currently has 10 offers under negotiation. Several territories have produced advances in the low six figures (in euros). On the French paperback side, J’ai lu’s CEO Hélène Fiamma made a six-figure preemptive offer the same evening she read the partial manuscript.

Foreign editors describe the appeal in similar terms.

“I hadn’t felt such an immediate connection to a story in a long time,” said Míriam Vall Rosinach, editor at Planeta. Germany’s Barbara Laugwitz, publisher at DTV, pointed to the universality of the central relationship: “This unforgettable duo is a source of inspiration on the bonds we can build outside the parent-child relationship, and on the transmission [of knowledge].”

Scouts contacted by the agency describe the book as a “tremendous engine” for French fiction abroad, arriving during a difficult first half of 2025 for bookstores in France. For Lannurien and Langlais, what distinguishes this case is not simply its geographic reach, but the combined speed and intensity of competing bids on a manuscript that was, at the point of sale, only a quarter complete.