MEADOWLARK by Wendi Stewart has sold to Dirk Vaihinger from Nagel & Kimche publishers, a Swiss-based Hanser affiliate, on a preempt, deal arranged by Hannah Fosh of the Liepman Agency on behalf of Stephanie Sinclair.
When her family’s car goes through the ice on Rainy Lake one cold March day in 1962, six-year-old Rebecca Archer is the only
person her father is able to pull from the sinking vehicle. But as 
Rebecca grows up in a farmhouse haunted by the absence of her mother and baby brother, raised by a man left nearly paralyzed with grief, she wonders if her father really did save her after all. Eventually, though, Rebecca finds solace in the company of her friends: Chuck, the sensitive son of a violently abusive father; and Lissie, an aboriginal girl being raised alone by a perfectionist white mother. As these three young people protect and support one another, Rebecca discovers that by saving Chuck and Lissie, she may also save herself. In her debut novel, Wendi Stewart tells the luminous, deeply imagined story of a young woman’s hard-won triumph over heartbreaking personal tragedy.
MEADOWLARK has already received phenomenal praise and was recently included in Publisher’s Weekly’s Hot Fall Adult Titles list of Canadian publications, in the good company of Margaret Atwood and Patrick deWitt.