Ethan Hawke sells second novel

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Ethan Hawke has been moonlighting as a novelist and director. With his directorial debut, the digital feature "Last Word On Paradise," in the can under the InDigEnt banner, he has completed a second novel and sold it to Knopf for an advance in the mid-six figures.

The deal cements Hawke's relationship to editor Jordan Pavlin, who he's followed from Little, Brown to Knopf. Little, Brown sold more than 40,000 hardcover copies of his debut, "The Hottest State."

"Ash Wednesday," like Hawke's first novel, is a story of romantic obsession, told in the alternate voices of a young couple on a road trip from New York to New Orleans as they grapple with questions of marriages and parenthood.

Little, Brown did not exercise an option on the novel, and Knopf acquired worldwide English rights through Hawke's long-standing literary agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, of the Writers Shop. Hawke retains film rights to both his novels.

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