After winning the hearts of millions of children around the world with his investigations into the adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, Lemony Snicket is now preparing to shed some light on another murky childhood: his own.
Snicket – the pen name of US author Daniel Handler – has sold more than 60m copies of his A Series of Unfortunate Events books, which follow the dreadful travails of Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire.
This autumn, six years after the last book in the bestselling series was published, he will reveal the "first authorised autobiographical account of his childhood", with the inaugural volume in the All the Wrong Questions series, Who Could That Be at This Hour?, out on 23 October.
Its UK publisher Egmont said the book would draw "on events that took place during a period of his youth spent in a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted", as Snicket "chronicles his experiences as an apprentice in an organisation nobody knows about". While there, he begins to ask a series of questions, "wrong questions that should not have been on his mind", said the publisher, with the novel Who Could That Be at This Hour? his account of the first wrong question.
Little has been given away about Snicket's past before, with his author biography only revealing that "Mr Snicket first received his education from public schools and private tutors, and then vice versa. Early in life, he learned to reupholster furniture, a skill that turned out to be far more important than anyone imagined."
"These books are questionable and contain questions. I, for one, question why anyone would be interested in reading them," said Snicket of the new series. Egmont was more enthusiastic, with managing director Cally Poplak saying that A Series of Unfortunate Events "changed the face of fiction for 8-12 year-olds in the UK", and that the "spectacular" new series was set to do the same.
