A Trilogy in 6 Parts?

Found via BookEmbargo and The Guardian’s site.

Now this does sound interesting…

Douglas Adams’s increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is to be extended to six titles, after Adams’s widow Jane Belson sanctioned a project which will see children’s author Eoin Colfer taking up the story.

And Another Thing… by Colfer, whose involvement with the project was personally requested by Belson, will be published next October by Penguin. No information has yet emerged about the plot of the novel but Hitchhiker fans will be hoping for a resurrection of much-loved characters Arthur Dent, Trillian and Ford Prefect, who were all apparently blown to smithereens at the end of the fifth novel, Mostly Harmless…

…The book will “make no claims for Eoin being Douglas”, according to Prior. “It’s not Eoin Colfer writing as Douglas Adams, as was the case with Sebastian Faulks,” she said, pointing to Penguin’s successful publication of Faulks’s new James Bond novel Devil May Care earlier this year. “It’s absolutely about him being himself – Eoin the author, but with the cast of Hitchhiker.”

Colfer himself is currently grappling with nerves over the quality of his addition to Adams’ oeuvre. “I feel more pressure to perform now than I ever have with my own books, and that is why I am bloody determined that this will be the best thing I have ever written,” he said. “For the first time in decades I feel the uncertainty that I last felt in my teenage years. There are people out there that really want to like this book.”

Listen to Eion Colfer, talk about the opportunity below:

Booking Through Thursday: Beginnings

Suggested by: Nithin

Here’s another idea about memorable first lines from books.

What are your favourite first sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its first sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the first line?

Sentences… I like that, it gives you a little more to work with than the just usual opening line, you get to play with in these things normally… Not that it actually makes much difference, it’s still the same book for me any way. It immediately appealed to my fifteen year old sense of humour, it’s appealed to me the half dozen or so times I’ve read the book since, and it still appeals to my 34 year old sense of humour now. (Hey, I’m a bloke, were always being accused of never growing up anyway! :mrgreen:).

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think that digital watches are a pretty neat idea…

This is of course from, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Which does of course also contain the highly appropriate line:

“This must be a thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of thursdays.”