Stephanie Meyer Announces Release of New Twilight Book Midnight Sun

Stephanie Meyer just announced that Midnight Sun, which follows the events of Twilight but told through Edward’s perspective, will be released August 4th, 2020. There was a timer on her website since last week, counting down to today’s announcement, which drove fans wild with speculation.

“I am very excited to finally, finally announce the release of Midnight Sun on 4 August,” Meyer said, in an prerecorded video broadcast on Good Morning America. “It’s a crazy time right now and I wasn’t sure it was the right time to put this book out, but some of you have been waiting for just so so long it didn’t seem right to make you wait any more.”

Stephenie Meyer on new book 'Midnight Sun' which comes out August 4: “Hopefully this book can be a fun distraction from the real world. I'm so excited to finally be able to share it with you." https://t.co/rJFjktp50S pic.twitter.com/hdp1xgsiKX

— Good Morning America (@GMA) May 4, 2020

This is a long time coming for Meyer, who faced a few setbacks regarding Midnight Sun. Firstly, the manuscript was leaked online, which Meyer called “a huge violation of [her] rights as an author”. She posted a snippet of it on her website, but seemed to abandon the project altogether. Her stance on shelving the book seemed even more of a sure thing after she discovered that E.L James, who penned the Fifty Shades of Grey series (Twilight fan fiction), published a book titled Grey, which is Fifty Shades of Grey told from Christian Grey’s perspective.

Publisher Little Brown said the book would see Meyer draw “on the classic myth of Hades and Persephone” to revisit the love story of Edward and Bella, in “an epic novel about the profound pleasures and devastating consequences of immortal love”. This is a pattern Meyer has established in the Twilight series, often drawing on older love stories, like Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights, and delivers a YA rendition of it.

For a Twi-Hard, August can’t come soon enough.