Just days before Frankfurt, Hodder and Stoughton have had a major pre-emptive offer accepted for world rights in THE THREE and one other novel by Sarah Lotz. The offer was made on the strength of a 33 page partial manuscript less than a day after Oliver Munson had submitted to a select group of editors. Rights have so far been sold by Hodder in the US to Reagan Arthur Books, Editrice Nord in Italy and Fleuve Noir in France with auctions and offering underway in many other territories.
Oli says: "When Anne and Oliver turned up on our doorstep unannounced, I knew they meant business. There was a phenomenal amount of interest in the incredibly brief time THE THREE was on the market but the passion and commitment shown by the two of them quickly convinced both author and agent that Hodder was the right home for Sarah's terrifying imagination"
Hodder will publish THE THREE in February 2014:
The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes. With terrorist attacks and environmental factors ruled out, there doesn't appear to be a correlation between the crashes, except that in three of the four air disasters a child survivor is found in the wreckage.
Dubbed 'The Three' by the international press, the children all exhibit disturbing behavioural problems, presumably caused by the horror they lived through and the unrelenting press attention. This attention becomes more than just intrusive when a rapture cult led by a charismatic evangelical minister insists that the survivors are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse. The Three are forced to go into hiding, but as the children's behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival...
Sarah Lotz is a screenwriter and novelist who has written horror books under the name S L Grey with author Louis Greenberg, and a YA zombie series with her daughter, Savannah, under the pseudonym Lily Herne.