The second part of the novel The Time Traveler’s Wife will be published this fall The Time Traveler’s Wife

A sequel to Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is scheduled to be published this fall.

Life Outside the System, which Niffenegger worked on for 13 years, is set in the same world as the original novel. The Time Traveler’s Wife has sold more than 9 million copies worldwide since its publication, and was made into a 2009 film starring Rachel McAdams, as well as an HBO series and a musical.

The new book – scheduled to be published on October 27 by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin, in the UK – revolves around the life of Alba DeTamble, the daughter of Henry and Claire, the two central characters in the original novel.

Niffenegger wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife between 1997 and 2002, and “had no intention of writing any kind of sequel.” It was only years later that she had an idea for a follow-up story about Alba, which she began in November 2012.

In The Time Traveler’s Wife, we learn that Henry suffers from “temporal displacement disorder,” meaning that he involuntarily travels through time, always arriving naked at his destination. Alba inherits the condition. In the original book, Henry dies when Alba is five years old.

The second part is partly about love — the “seed” of the book is that Alba has two husbands, Zach and Oliver — in two different time periods, with overlap, Niffenegger says.

When Niffenegger began writing Part II, Obama had just been re-elected; It was a “different world.” As she continued to write, “the world around me was changing a lot, and the book was starting to become more and more political.”

Alba was born six days before 9/11, so Niffenegger knew that if she wanted to write about her hero as an adult, she would need to “take some guesses” about what the future might look like. “I thought, well, this probably has a lot to do with climate change. So I started writing in that direction, and of course it quickly turned into a dystopia, and then I thought, well, let’s bring some politics to bear on this situation. But I would put something in the book, and then it would happen in real life, and that would have to be painful. Then 2016 came and it blew everything up. Alba’s dystopia and my dystopia started to look alike.”

Alba is a violinist and composer, so “the thing that keeps popping its head up here and there is, well, if the world is going to fall apart, why are we making art? But my personal feeling about that is that we make things for ourselves, we make them for other people, we make them to communicate, to document our thinking, and sometimes we change our ideas. So, even if you know the world is going to fall apart tomorrow, you still have to get out there and make things and do things.” Niffenegger hopes the book will encourage “people to be more active in art, politics, and in their lives.”

In Life Out of Order, “Alba is haunted by secrets she must keep from those she loves most, including Zack, her supportive anchor in the chaos, and Oliver, a fellow time traveler and musician,” says the publisher’s description of the book. “Her journey takes her from riots in the streets of Chicago to the eerie asylum of the Yellow House, to the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls, a virtual sanctuary of forgotten memories and lost artifacts.”

“I always thought a female time traveler would have a hard time walking around naked and getting harassed all the time,” Niffenegger explains. “Then I thought, what if she has a secluded place, it’s hers?” – Much like the meadow in the original book, it is the meeting place of Henry and Claire. In Part 2, Alba is drawn to the Yellow House when she travels through time, a Victorian-era estate she has owned since before she was born, located in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood.

The author described writing Life Outside the System as “all-consuming,” but said she would miss “living it.”

Hannah Westland, publisher at Jonathan Cape, said The Time Traveler’s Wife “was one of the most important literary publications in history”. “Life Outside the System” is “strange in the moment” and “a deeply moving celebration of love.” Vintage, the Penguin imprint overseen by Jonathan Cape, will publish new paperback and hardback editions of the original book this year.