Author picks up where Douglas Adams left off

After 16 years, a new title in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series is to be published. Its creator Douglas Adams died in 2001 after writing five installments but now the children's author Eoin Colfer has been chosen to take up the story. Colfer, 43, best known for the best-selling Artemis Fowl novels, has won the personal approval of Adams's widow, Jane Belson, for the project.

Colfer says he was first introduced to the books as a teenager and regarded them as a "slice of satirical genius". He says: "My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series. But on reflection I realised that this is a wonderful opportunity to work with characters I have loved since childhood and give them something of my own voice while holding on to the spirit of Douglas Adams."

Adams had wished to write a sixth Hitchhiker book himself but died at 49. In an interview he once said: "People have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless [the fifth in the series] is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number."

Around 16m copies of the Hitchhiker books have been sold worldwide, so Colfer has every chance of producing a bestseller when And Another Thing... is published in a year's time. However, the opening may prove a challenge: the much-loved characters Arthur Dent, Trillian and Ford Prefect were all apparently blown up at the end of Mostly Harmless. ·