Neil Gaiman is set to release two books this year – a selection of non-fiction writings and a special edition of his first novel Neverwhere,...

Neil Gaiman is set to release two books this year – a selection of non-fiction writings and a special edition of his first novel Neverwhere, illustrated by Children’s laureate Chris Riddell.

Gaiman’s non-fiction title The View From the Cheap Seats will be published by Headline on 31st May and include writings, lectures and talks on passions that ignited him as a boy, youth and young man and which still “burn within him today”. They include the lives of writers he admired and loved - Douglas Adams and his one time collaborator Terry Pratchett, along with genres and personalities, libraries, bookshops, films and comics.

Gaiman said: “I fled the world of journalism almost 30 years ago, for the safer shores of making things up. Still, the real world didn't go away, and I've talked about it over the years. I've written about libraries and refugees and being mournful at the Oscars, ‎written about books I loved and why comics were not tulip bulbs, written about my friends, living and dead, written about the things and people who have kept me going in the dark times…Now I've assembled‎ a thick book, filled with non-fiction. That will, I hope, inspire and enlighten, and perhaps send some of you off to find new authors, or to write books of your own.”

Stephen Fry added: “Neil Gaiman was born to write. I cannot imagine that a day goes by without his putting one word after another in the service of telling a story, communicating an idea, sparking a new thought in a happy reader.”

The View From the Cheap Seats will be published in hardback priced £20.

Gaiman’s second book this year will be a special edition of his first novel Neverwhere, illustrated by children’s laureate Chris Riddell.

Gaiman said: “Chris Riddell is an amazing artist. Last year Neverwhere was voted, by the public, their most beloved book about London, and Chris drew the Neverwhere characters on a bench shaped like a book, that would go up for auction. From that moment on, his doom was sealed. He was going to have to draw the characters in the book that could be bought by everybody, not just the lucky winners of a bench in a charity auction. Unfortunately, Chris is the busiest man in the world, and, as well immediately made Children’s Laureate,‎ following this, getting him to draw Neverwhere seemed unlikely. Fortunately, he wanted to.”

The book will be published on 14th July 2016, priced £14.99.