The literary agent Felicity Blunt modestly agrees that she has had a good run lately. Pick up almost any word-of-mouth must-read book or critical darling these days, flick to the acknowledgments, and it’s highly likely you’ll see the 41-year-old Blunt’s name there. “I think every agent sometimes has a year when it just comes together,” she tells me over lunch in London’s Soho neighborhood.
“Claire Keegan,” whom Blunt began representing in 2012, “is just extraordinary—the writer of her generation. Any generation, actually.” (The Irish author’s Small Things Like These was short-listed for last year’s Booker Prize—rare for a novella—and her 2022 novella, Foster, was made into the film The Quiet Girl, chosen as Ireland’s entry in this year’s Academy Awards.) “And Bonnie Garmus is an obvious example.” (The American author’s debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry, is currently omnipresent in bookshops.) “Then my husband wrote a memoir that’s done all right.”
