Today, C.J. Tudor‘s spine-chilling debut The Chalk Man sees its first release, published in the US by Penguin Random House / Crown.
It’s been a long wait indeed since September 2016, when The Chalk Man captured the attention of publishers at Frankfurt Book Fair and sold into 39 territories with unprecedented speed. Crown describe it as “a riveting and relentlessly compelling psychological suspense debut that weaves a mystery about a childhood game gone dangerously awry, and will keep readers guessing right up to the shocking ending.”
Our very own Fiona Barton said of the novel “I haven’t had a sleepless night due to a book for a long time. The Chalk Man changed that”, with Kirkus comparing Tudor’s debut to Stephen King’s Stand by Me and It.
To coincide with the book’s US publication, Goodreads have also shared this fascinating Debut Author Snapshot, giving you an insight into the mind behind The Chalk Man with her inspirations, her childhood fears and her writing process.
We’re incredibly excited for US readers to get their hands on this unique, explosive novel at last. Michael Joseph will follow with publication this Thursday. Congratulations Caz, on the first of many global publications!
In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.
In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead.
That’s when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
Expertly alternating between flashbacks and the present day, The Chalk Man is the very best kind of suspense novel, one where every character is wonderfully fleshed out and compelling, where every mystery has a satisfying payoff, and where the twists will shock even the savviest reader.
