Author says he was ‘ambushed’ by story which began as a collection of tweets last year, and ‘quickly acquired a life of its own’

A story which Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell originally began on Twitter has turned into a fully-fledged novel, which will be published this October.

The acclaimed novelist has previously taken at least two years between novels, but his publisher Sceptre announced on Wednesday that last September’s release of The Bone Clocks – described by Ursula Le Guin as “a whopper of a story” – will be followed with a new short novel, Slade House, this autumn. “Accustomed to having his next few novels thoroughly mapped out, David Mitchell was not expecting to be ambushed by this one, but it proved irresistible,” said Sceptre.

Slade House began as the 280-tweet story The Right Sort, which was set in the same universe as The Bone Clocks and which Mitchell released tweet by tweet last July, describing the medium at the time as a “diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjacket”. But the 2,000-word story “quickly acquired a life of its own”, said Sceptre.

“Scenes grew, bred and sprouted new scenes until The Right Sort passed the 6,000-word mark and announced itself as part one of a five-part novel,” said Mitchell.

His publisher at Sceptre, Carole Welch, said the new novel was a “very welcome surprise … just when we’d resigned ourselves to waiting a few years before being able to read the successor to The Bone Clocks”. Sceptre also has a follow-up to The Reason I Jump, Mitchell and KA Yoshida’s translation from the Japanese of Naoki Higashida’s memoir about his autism, planned for 2016, it announced.

Although Slade House will be shorter than Mitchell’s major novels, which also include Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, it is “every bit as enthralling and inventive: a taut, spine-chilling, intricately woven, reality-warping tale that begins in 1979 and comes to its electrifying conclusion on October 31st, 2015”, said Sceptre. It will also feature a character “who might be a shade familiar from The Bone Clocks”, it added.