Though THE CHILDREN OF HURIN is already being marketed as a new volume of the venerated fantasy writer's work, that's a bit of a misnomer. Instead, his son Christopher has taken the book (which his father began in 1918 and didn't finish) and edited the complete work together from many drafts, resulting in the first "new" book since SIMARILLION, published four years after Tolkien's death in 1973. The new work will be published in the UK by HarperCollins and in the US by Houghton Mifflin in April.

In a statement, Christopher Tolkien said, "It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of the Children of Hurin as an independent work, between its own covers, with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which he left some parts of it." Janet Silver, v-p and publisher of Houghton Mifflin, added: "As J.R.R. Tolkien's original American publisher, dating back to The Hobbit, we are extremely proud to be bringing thisproject to Tolkien's devoted readership in the United States."