Richard Lewis, whose young adult novel The Flame Tree was one of my favorites of 2004, has a new novel coming out at the end of the year. THE KILLING SEA: A Novel about the Tsunami that Stunned the World is forthcoming from Simon and Schuster in December. The novel’s film rights have already been bought by Fox 2000 and Scott Free Productions.
Lewis, whose parents were American missionaries to Indonesia, also blogs about surfing and writing from Bali at Novelist in Paradise. Here is how he described how his second novel came to be:
I was a volunteer relief worker in Aceh immediately after the tsunami disaster, and spent a total of about a month there. My agent Scott Miller urged me to write a story, which came naturally out of the dozens and dozens of people I talked to, and the ground I covered in my volunteer work. Because this is primarily for the US market, I introduced a American teenaged girl and her younger brother, traveling on a sailboat that is caught in the disaster. Her story is interwoven with that of a teenaged Acehnese boy, and who meets up with her.
I wrote a couple opening chapters and a synopsis of the rest of the story as I saw it. Simon and Schuster bought it overnight, the quickest turnaround Scott has had.
So check out the blog and look for The Killing Sea at the end of the year.
P.s. Here is a Q&A I did with Lewis last year.
