John Green To Publish First Novel In Over 5 Years, ‘Turtles All The Way Down’

Beloved vlogger and noted author John Green has announced his first new novel in five-and-a-half years — the follow-up to his 2012 smash The Fault In Our Stars.

Titled Turtles All The Way Down and hitting shelves on October 10, the YA novel will center around Aza Holmes, a young woman grappling with mental illness as she investigates the disappearance of a fugitive billionaire, reports The Los Angeles Times. “This is my first attempt to write directly about the kind of mental illness that has affected my life since childhood,” Green, 39, said in a statement. “So while the story is fictional, it is also quite personal.”

Green, who suffers from OCD and anxiety, has been open about the pressures of helming a follow-up novel that could live up to the massive success of Fault, which was subsequently turned into a film starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort. Green even posted a brutally honest video about that pressure on his VlogBrothers

YouTube channel — which he headlines with his brother Hank — last September.

Green won the Printz, the YA genre’s top award, for his debut novel Looking For Alaska. He is also the author of An Abundance Of Katherines, Paper Towns, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson — written in collaboration with David Levithan. Paper Towns also became a movie in 2015.

“Turtles All the Way Down is both a singularly personal read and a catalyst for conversation and community,” Julie Strauss-Gabel, the president and publisher of Dutton Books For Young Readers (a Penguin imprint) said in a statement. “It is with tremendous pride and great excitement that his longtime Penguin family can finally shout this news to the world.”

Check out Green’s announcement video below: