I’m thrilled to announce the preorder campaign for The Towering Sky, the final book in the Thousandth Floor trilogy!

If you order the book by August 27, 2018, through any US/Canadian retailer, you will gain access to exclusive, never-before-seen bonus content: the Mariel chapters that were cut from The Dazzling Heights! You can read more about the chapters and the story behind them below. To enter, submit your receipt online at katharinemcgee.com/TTSpreorder. The bonus chapters will be sent to your inbox on August 28, the release day for The Towering Sky!

BUT THERE’S MORE! If you preorder through my local bookstore, Blue Willow Bookstore in Houston, your book will be signed and personalized—plus you’ll receive a custom Thousandth Floor makeup bag + lip balm! Blue Willow does ship anywhere in the world. If you order through Blue Willow, no need to submit the receipt through the preorder page; you’ll automatically get the Mariel chapters in your inbox on August 28. Just remember to enter your name in the comments section of the order if you would like your book personalized!

What are these Mariel chapters, you ask? Warning: spoilers for The Thousandth Floor & The Dazzling Heights ahead.

In the past year, a lot of you have wondered why Mariel didn’t have a bigger role in the second book of the trilogy. After all, The Thousandth Floor ends on a Mariel chapter, The Dazzling Heights opens with a Mariel chapter—and then she seems to vanish until the final pages of the novel! If you are a close reader, though, you probably noticed that she isn’t really gone: she appears in the stories of several other characters. They just haven’t met her, so they don’t realize who she is, or how involved she is in all their fates…

I didn’t originally mean for Mariel to be so mysteriously off-screen. In the first draft of The Dazzling Heights, Mariel was actually another narrator, with just as many chapters as the other five characters! But when I re-read that first draft, I realized that Mariel’s chapters weren’t quite working. Aside from the page count issues (I tend to write long books!), Mariel’s perspective took a lot of the suspense and excitement from the rest of the novel. This was a hard choice, because Mariel had become very dear to me as a character (side note, why do I keep killing off my favorites?!) but ultimately, I realized that the story would be stronger and more impactful without her narration.

Now that the final book is about to release, I’m so excited that I can finally share these deleted Mariel chapters with you guys. They won’t ever be published in print, so make sure to preorder The Towering Sky before its release date if you want to read them!