Ithaka Press, an imprint of Bonnier Books UK, has acquired The Scientist Who Wasn’t There: A true story of staggering deception by Joanne Briggs in a competitive pre-empt.
Sarah Braybrooke, Publishing Director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Euan Thorneycroft and Florence Rees at AM Heath. The book will be published as a lead title on 5th June 2025.
Briggs’s book is a riveting, beautifully written investigation with a major news story at its core and won the inaugural Bridport Memoir Prize. Cathy Rentzenbrink calls it ‘a page-turning mystery and a meditation on what it means for a child to know their parents’.
Renowned scientist Professor Michael Briggs was many things: A Space expert at NASA; an adviser to the World Health Organisation; a successful Big Pharma executive. But Michael Briggs had a secret. A scandal broke out in 1986 when research he conducted was revealed to be compromised. Patients were also claiming that a pregnancy test he pioneered had caused devastating birth defects. Soon after his fall from grace, Briggs was dead, struck down by a mystery illness in a foreign country.
Briggs left behind a long list of publications, patents, and inventions, including his involvement with the controversial drug Primodos. But he also left behind hundreds of people who believe they are victims of his negligence and who are still fighting for justice to this day. And he left someone else: his daughter, Joanne. After decades of wondering who her father really was, Joanne decided to investigate for herself. In hypnotic prose, she uncovers the secret that shaped her father’s entire life and made his story more fantastic than any science fiction. As she discovered, Briggs’s greatest invention was himself.
Joanne Briggs said: ‘I’m so pleased to have the opportunity to work with Sarah and her team at Ithaka, so I can tell this strange story from my life in print.’
Sarah Braybrooke said: ‘As soon as I started reading Jo’s book I knew it was something special; it’s a propulsive, goosebump-raising mystery reminiscent of Sam Knight’s The Premonitions Bureau or Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary. But the full story of Michael Briggs also raises profound questions of public interest, akin to those in the Post Office Scandal. The fact that this forensic, luminously-written book was written by none other that Briggs’ daughter makes it truly an astounding read.’
The Scientist Who Wasn’t There will be publishing in hardback, eBook and audiobook 5th June.
