The L-Shaped Room (novel) The L-Shaped Room (novel) The L-Shaped Room is a 1960 British novel by Lynne Reid Banks which tells the story of a young woman, unmarried and pregnant, who moves into a London boarding house, befriending a young man in the building. It was adapted into a film by Bryan Forbes with significant differences from the novel. "The L-Shaped Room" is set in the late 1950s and follows a young woman, Jane Graham, who arrives alone at a run-down boarding house in London after being turned out of her comfortable middle class home by her shocked father after telling him she
Debut novel sales are anticipated, the advance can be larger. For an example of an unusually high advance: in 2013, the highly anticipated "City on Fire" by Garth Risk Hallberg captured the attention of ten publishers who started a bidding war that ended with Knopf buying the rights to the book for 2 million dollars. The book's film production rights were purchased soon after by producer Scott Rudin. For similar reasons that advances are frequently not very large—novels frequently don't sell well until the author gains a literary reputation. There are exceptions, however; YouTube star Zoella published her debut novel "Girl Online"