"Nick," the prequel to F. Scott Fitzerald's "The Great Gatsby," will be published on Jan. 5, 2021, mere days after the 1925 novel enters the public domain in the United States.
The prequel was written by American author Michael Farris Smith, who is best known for bestselling novels "Blackwood," "The Figher," and "Desperation Road."
Smith has focused on the early life of Fitzgerald's beloved character Nick Carrayway, as he embarks on a "a transcontinental redemptive journey to espcape the horrors he witness during the trench warfare of the First World War.
The prequel takes place a few years before Carraway rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island and encounters the enigmatic multimillionaire Jay Gatsby in "The Great Gatsby."
"The last time I read Gatsby, a few years ago, Nick stayed in my imagination, and he reveals so little about himself in the story, I couldn't help but begin to create him in my mind, and I knew the only way to get out was to put it on the page. So I embraced the idea and dove into it with all those emotions fuelling the creation," Smith said in a statement.
"I've always been drawn to Nick Carraway as a character, his feelings on turning 30 and a decade of uncertainty before him have always rung true to my own emotions when I was the same age. And I still feel that way much of the time, torn between the revelations of what we discover in life and the abandon of those same discoveries," the author added.