On the first morning of the Frankfurt bookfair, Philip Gwyn Jones of Scribe UK has sealed a World All-languages deal with Laura Morris for an exceptional memoir, Keep Clear. It is Tom Cutler's wonderfully bittersweet, funnystrange account of living unwittingly with Asperger's syndrome.
It is only at the age of 55, after a crack-up, that Tom gets the diagnosis that allows him to make sense of everything that's come before, including his weird obsessions with road-sign design, magic tricks and Sherlock Holmes, his accidental rudeness, maladroitness, unease, Pan Am smile, and other social impediments. But, unlike some Asperger's sufferers, Tom possesses great facility with words, and this shines through this exceptionally warm, sympathetic and moving memoir, which is alternately strikingly revealing, laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad.
Tom Cutler is a bestselling British author of reference books on flags, airline insignia, maps, and music, which have been translated into several languages. He has written also for The Guardian, Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and BBC radio. This is his first work of narrative nonfiction.
Tom has always known that there is something strange about the way he relates to the world but it was only in 2016 that he was formally assessed as being on the autistic spectrum. This, he says, was the happiest day of his life. ‘Seeing the simple reason behind my mysterious, lonely, and sometimes hilarious life since childhood suddenly illuminated, I wanted to share my joy with ordinary readers. Having found some of the books I've read about Asperger's rather dry, academic, or longwinded, I decided to write a humorous page-turner. I hope that's what I've managed to do.’
Scribe will publish in 2019.