In April, Houghton Mifflin publishes a new book by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Hurin, one of three "great tales" Tolkien worked on during his life. The book has been completed by Tolkien's son Christopher who has acted as editor of much of his father's posthumous work and drew the maps for the original Lord of the Rings. The Children of Hurin has been referred to and extracted in other Tolkien work and has characters and themes familiar to readers of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

In a statement, Christopher Tolkien said, "It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of the Children of Hurin as an independent work, between its own covers, with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which he left some parts of it." J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973; his last complete posthumously published work was the Silmarillion, which appeared in 1977.

HarperCollins UK bought world rights for the deal; Houghton Mifflin has U.S. rights. The book will be published simultaneously with Harper editions internationally.