The sequel to Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie now has a release date: October 5, 2006.
British children's book author Geraldine McCaughrean has completed the manuscript for Peter Pan in Scarlet, Oxford University Press and the Great Ormond Street Hospital announced Thursday. The children's hospital commissioned the official sequel in 2004.
The sequel will offer "high adventure, dramatic tensions and all the swashbuckling, danger and derring-do [readers] can handle," said a statement from the hospital.
Barrie bequeathed the copyright of his Peter Pan tale to the London hospital on his death in 1937. The copyright agreement expires outside the U.K. in 2007.
The royalties for the upcoming book will be split between McCaughrean and the hospital.
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Hospital officials selected McCaughrean after conducting a worldwide search for an author to continue the enchanting tale. Among the stipulations was that the sequel include Barrie's original characters, including Peter, Wendy, Tinkerbell and Captain Hook.
"Neverland was such a marvellous place to spend my year," she said. "I clean forgot Barrie's ghost might be reading the computer screen over my shoulder — forgot to worry whether the necessary people would like what I wrote."
McCaughrean is a multiple winner of the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year honour for her reinterpretations of literary classics for young readers.
It will be interesting to see what McCaughrean will do with the sequel -- we haven't heard a peep of buzz about it yet, although some purists are already grumping that the classics should be left alone and not sharecropped out to new authors.
