New book by Paula Hawkins to be released in May

Two women, a single mother and a teenage girl, are found dead at the bottom of a river in a small town in northern England, just weeks apart. An investigation into the mysterious deaths reveals that the women had a complicated and intertwined history.

That’s the premise of Into The Water, a psychological thriller by Paula Hawkins, which Riverhead Books will publish in May.

The new novel will arrive just over two years after Hawkins became a surprise global sensation with her mega best-seller The Girl On The Train, which has sold more than 18 million copies worldwide and more than 6 million in the United States. That book, about a recently divorced alcoholic woman attempting to piece together memories that she believes hold the clues to a young woman’s disappearance, has spent 97 weeks on the best-seller list. It was adapted into a feature film starring Emily Blunt that has grossed nearly US$165 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

The novel’s runaway success came as a surprise to Hawkins and to Riverhead, which originally planned a first printing of 40,000 copies. Hawkins, a former financial journalist who was born in Zimbabwe and lives in London, had previously published romantic comedies under the pen name Amy Silver, with mediocre sales. When she sold The Girl On The Train, based on an incomplete manuscript, she was nearly broke.

“The Girl On The Train was a last roll of the dice for me as a fiction writer,” she said in an interview with The New York Times.

Into The Water, which explores the porousness of memory, has some thematic overlap with The Girl On The Train.

“As with her last thriller, the murder mystery is just one piece of the larger whole,” Sarah McGrath, the editor-in-chief of Riverhead, said in a statement. “Just as The

Girl On The Train explored voyeurism and self-perception, so does Into The Water interrogate the deceitfulness of memory and all the dangerous ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present and future.”

In an interview with Australian newspaper The Herald Sun in May, Hawkins alluded to the new book, and described it as a thriller about two sisters.

“It’s about how your memories of childhood shape you and make you the person you are,” Hawkins said.

“What interests me is that often the way we remember things that happened to us in childhood can be incredibly different to how our siblings remember it, or people who were there at the same time,” she said. —