Celebrity sign-ups at Frankfurt:
• One of the hottest deals at this year's fair has been the acquisition by Icon Books of The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change. Written by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, it apparently turns current thinking about climate change "inside out".
• There's a new book on the way from Stephen Hawking; The Grand Design will be published by Bantam Press UK in autumn 2008. The original of the Hawking species, A Brief History of Time, has sold 10 million since it was published in 1988.
• Another celeb sign-up is the tenor Placido Domingo, whose The Joy of Opera has been bought by Faber for "a six-figure sum".
• Handsome young BBC historian Dan Snow - son of newsreading veteran Peter - has signed a two-book deal with Hodder. The first volume, 1759: The Battle for Quebec, will appear in September 2009.
• This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Orhan Pamuk, is to produce a collection of non-fiction, Other Colours, and a novel called The Museum of Innocence, for Faber & Faber.
• The same publisher has snapped up the first novel of the poet Owen Sheers: Resistance will be a reimagining of history set in an alternative 1944 in which the Germans occupy Britain.
• Another second World War story making waves at Frankfurt is Les Bienveillants (The Furies), a 90-page novel written in French by the US author Jonathan Littell, son of thriller writer Robert Littell. US and UK rights won't be auctioned until after the fair, but it has been predicted that the book, which has been at number one in the French bestseller lists for Gallimard, will create a "feeding frenzy".
