The party to celebrate the success of Lauren Kate’s mega-selling Fallen series was never going to be just any old Monday night bash. Hosted at Proud in Camden (my teenage daughter says it's one of the coolest clubs in London) – it boasted winged waiters, scarlet petals strewn across the floor and a mannequin adorned in a gothic floor-length black satin gown.
With sales of Fallen, Torment and Passion, the first three books in the series, approaching a million copies in the UK, Australia and New Zealand alone, the mood was upbeat. Lauren Kate, a tall, slender American in a short strapless dress, made the evening even more memorable by reading an extract from the prologue of the fourth and final book, Rapture, which is due out in June next year (2012). Lauren has just finished the first draft and the contents are so top secret that all the guests – bloggers, hacks and publishers alike – were sworn to secrecy.
If you’re one of the few who haven’t discovered the Fallen series yet, they make a refreshing change in a genre dominated by Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books. Aimed at teenagers but read by loads of older readers too, the darkly compelling series follows the passionate love story of Luce and her fallen angel boyfriend Daniel back and forth across five thousand years of history.
When I got the chance to talk to Lauren I asked if she’d been surprised by the books’ massive success. “It’s insane,” she smiled. “I’m surprised every day. I really wasn’t expecting it. But pretty quickly after they were published I was getting emails from people all around the world saying how much they were loving the books.”
After her current UK tour, Lauren will fly home to Los Angeles to put the final touches to Rapture. Then in January she will start a brand-new trilogy – again top secret, but which she revealed will have “no angels and no vampires.”
“The first chapter is always hard to do,” she admitted. “But I sit down and write half a chapter a day and don’t worry about it or let myself revise it all until the end.”
Like millions of fans across the world, I can't wait.
STOP PRESS: Random House Children's Books have just announced that an additional new novel set in the world of the Fallen series will be published on February 2 next year (2012), just in time for Valentine's Day. Titled Fallen in Love, it is described as "a riveting collection of four intertwined love stories featuring the Fallen characters that fans have grown to know and love - Miles, Shelby, Roland, Arriane and Luce and Daniel."
