Neil Gaiman's New 'Neverwhere' Sequel Will Return to London Below

When Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere left Richard Mayhew, he was returning to the world of London Below after deciding that his own life no longer fit.

Gaiman recently announced that he has already written three chapters of a Neverwhere sequel, which will be called The Seven Sisters. It will revisit the world of Neverwhere, which imagines a dark and fantastical realm of London Below, populated by the people who have slipped between the cracks, invisible to those in the normal society of London Above.

The novel was first published in 1996; the show it’s based on aired the same year. A radio adaptation starring James McAvoy and Natalie Dormer aired in 2013. But because the real world as London Above has changed a great deal in twenty-plus years, and Neil Gaiman is most eager to reflect the plight of refugees in his sequel. At an event in London, he said.

When Lenny Henry and I came up with the original idea for Neverwhere almost 25 years ago, what attracted us was the idea that we could talk about the homeless, talk about the dispossessed, talk about the people who fall through the cracks, and do it in a way that was exciting and fun and interesting and also relevant and might change people’s heads…The giant wheel has turned over the last few years and looking around the work I have been doing for UNHCR for refugees, the kind of shape … London is in now, the kind of ways [it] is different to how it was 20 years ago, meant that I decided that it actually was time to do something.

However characters like Richard and Door figure into The Seven Sisters, the main story will involve refugees. As Gaiman’s fantastical social commentary will also get its long awaited screen-debut in Starz’s American Gods, and Good Omens is coming to Amazon and the BBC. It’s a golden era for Gaiman fans — no matter what London they prefer.