Penguin Canada acquires Emma Knight’s Dolly after breakout debut
Emma Knight with The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, her debut novel and a 2025 Giller Prize finalist. Penguin Canada has acquired Canadian rights to her second novel, Dolly.
Photo credit: Giller Prize / Author photo © Caitlin Cronenberg
Penguin Canada has acquired Canadian rights to Dolly, the second novel from Toronto-based author Emma Knight, whose fiction debut became a Canadian and New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna selection and a Giller Prize finalist while also selling internationally and moving into television development.
The Dolly acquisition was reported Sept. 17 by Quill & Quire, which said Penguin Canada publisher Marion Garner and executive editor Lara Hinchberger acquired the Canadian rights. The trade publication describes the novel as “a meditation on marriage, infidelity, and motherhood.” No publication date was available in public material from Penguin Canada, Knight or her literary agency as of Sept. 23.
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, Knight’s first novel, was published in Canada by Viking Canada on Jan. 7, 2025. It follows childhood friends Pen and Alice, both from Toronto, as they begin university in Edinburgh. Pen arrives in Scotland carrying questions about her divorced parents and their connection to the aristocratic Lennox family, while Alice pursues acting and becomes involved with one of her tutors. Motherhood runs through the novel alongside its family mysteries, relationships and coming-of-age story.
The novel had attracted publishers in several countries well before readers saw it. In April 2023, Knight’s agency, Transatlantic, announced that Pamela Dorman Books/Viking had pre-empted U.S. rights, Penguin Canada had pre-empted Canadian rights and Quercus had acquired the U.K. edition at auction. Dutch rights were subsequently sold to Uitgeverij Mozaïek. Samantha Haywood and Laura Cameron represented Knight on the original North American deals.
Four days before its Canadian publication, Transatlantic announced that The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus had been selected as Read with Jenna’s January 2025 book-club pick. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller, while Penguin Random House Canada describes it as an instant No. 1 Canadian bestseller.
Sales data from Canadian independent bookstores indicates that the book remained in circulation well beyond its launch. Bookmanager figures published by Quill & Quire placed The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus fifth among the top-selling Canadian titles of 2025, based on sales reported by 265 independent Canadian booksellers between Jan. 1 and Dec. 1. It ranked behind books by Omar El Akkad, Louise Penny, Mark Carney and Carley Fortune.
By the fall, the novel had also reached the Giller Prize shortlist. It was one of five finalists selected from more than 100 submitted works of fiction for the 2025 prize, which was ultimately won by Souvankham Thammavongsa for Pick a Colour.
During the Giller season, Knight spoke about how motherhood entered the novel while she was writing it. She told the Giller Prize that her life as the story developed was “saturated with the demands and rewards of motherhood,” and that she kept returning to questions around maternal self-sacrifice.
“The octopus surprised me,” Knight said in the same interview. The character had not been part of her initial conception of the novel, but emerged as she considered what she described as “maternal self-sacrifice and self-erasure” across generations.
Motherhood is one of the few subjects already disclosed for Dolly, alongside marriage and infidelity. Knight has not publicly outlined the new novel in detail in the sources available so far, so it remains unclear how closely those themes will connect to the questions she explored in The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus.
The debut also moved into screen development soon after publication. In February 2025, Transatlantic announced that Amazon MGM Television was developing The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus as a television series. The book continued into additional editions, including a U.S. paperback in January 2026 and a German translation published by Blumenbar in March. Transatlantic’s Frankfurt 2026 rights catalogue continues to feature the novel among titles it is marketing internationally.
Knight had an established publishing career before her fiction debut. She is a journalist and entrepreneur who co-founded the Toronto-based beverage company Greenhouse and co-authored The Greenhouse Cookbook, published by Penguin Canada in 2017, and How to Eat with One Hand with Christine Flynn in 2021. Publisher and Giller Prize biographies describe both books as bestsellers. Knight lives in Toronto, and her writing has appeared in publications including The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Vogue, Literary Hub and The New York Times.
Her relationship with Penguin Canada therefore predates her fiction career. The company published both of her cookbooks, while Nicole Winstanley and Laura Dosky acquired Canadian rights to The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus in 2023. Quill & Quire now reports Garner and Hinchberger as the Canadian acquirers of Dolly.
When the first novel was acquired, Knight had already published two cookbooks and worked as a journalist and entrepreneur, but had yet to publish fiction. The acquisition comes after a debut that reached bestseller lists in Canada and the United States, became a Read with Jenna selection and Giller finalist, generated international publishing deals and entered television development.
For now, the publicly reported title is Dolly, Penguin Canada holds the Canadian rights, and marriage, infidelity and motherhood are the subjects disclosed so far. Penguin Canada, Knight and her agency had not publicly posted a publication date or fuller synopsis in the material available as of Sept. 23.
