After a quiet build-up to the Frankfurt Book Fair, a book that Reagan Arthur pre-empted has people buzzing. With the fair days away--it opens on October 10--Arthur, for her eponymnous imprint at Little, Brown, bought U.S. rights to Sarah Lotz's thriller, The Three, from Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K. The novel, which Hodder is publishing in February 2014, and which RA will release in spring 2014, has also sold in Italy and France.

Hodder is comparing the book to Justin Cronin's The Passage, calling it "an enormously ambitious mainstream crossover." It follows three survivors of different plane crashes, interweaving their stories and explaining how "their interlinked fate will change the world."

Lotz, who is South African, is a screenwriter and also writes different genre books under a series of pseudonyms; she pens her urban horror novels as S.L. Grey (writing with author Louis Greenberg), and also writes a YA zombie series, with her daughter Savannah, as Lily Herne. Agent Oli Munson at Blake Friedmann represented Lotz in the Hodder deal.