New Lemony Snicket Book Gets One Million Copy First Printing, Release Date

Lemony Snicket is coming back and in a big way.

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Little, Brown Books announced that Who Could That Be at This Hour?, the first book in the new Lemony Snicket series All the Wrong Questions will hit bookstores on October 23, 2012 with a first printing of one million copies.

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Who Could it Be at This Hour? explores Snicket's mysterious past for the first time. Little else has been revealed about the book other than it is set in "a fading town" where Snicket becomes "an apprentice in an organization nobody knows about" and starts asking "a series of questions—wrong questions that should not have been on his mind.” Who Could That Be at This Hour? is Snicket’s account of the first wrong question. Little Brown is using the website LSATWQ.com to promote the upcoming series and has released a teaser cover as well.

A Series of Unfortunate Events, the original Lemony Snicket series, has sold over 60 million copies worldwide since its debut in 1999.  The books follow three children who are placed in the care of their Uncle Olaf after their parents are killed in a fire. Olaf treats them badly and tries to steal their inheritance. Snicket narrates the books, acting as the children’s biographer. The series comprises thirteen books, with the last appearing in 2006, plus a series of stand-alone books about Snicket himself.

It spawned a 2004 movie starring Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep, and Jude Law as Snicket that grossed $209 million worldwide.  Director Brad Silberling has mentioned several times that he would like to do sequel. No word yet if the new series will spur that project along.

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of author Daniel Handler, who invented it to screen junk mail (he would sign up for catalogs as Snicket) and later adopted it for the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Handler originally started out writing adult novels but when his first book was rejected 37 times, he took up the suggestion to try writing for a younger audience. He has written twenty books under the Snicket pen name as well as three adult novels. His 2011 YA novel, Why We Broke Up (published under his own name) was a Printz Honoree as finalist for best YA book of 2011.