Nick Carraway, last seen at the end of The Great Gatsby contemplating the futility of trying to move beyond our past, is set to reveal a little more of his own, with author Michael Farris Smith announcing his prequel to F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel. US copyright in The Great Gatsby, which is generally regarded as one of the best novels ever written, expires on 1 January 2021, meaning that the work enters the public domain and can be freely adapted for the first time. Farris Smith’s prequel, Nick, will be published four days later, on 5 January, in the US, by Little, Brown; and on 25 February in the UK by No Exit Press. The publishers say Nick Carraway will “step out of the shadows and into the spotlight”, with the story focusing on his life before his meeting with the enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s novel. Its famously tragic ending leaves Nick considering how hard it is to move on from our histories, in Fitzgerald’s most famous line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” More than 25m copies have been sold since it was published in 1925. Farris Smith, the author of novels including Blackwood, The Fighter and Desperation Road, said he had always been drawn to Nick Carraway as a character. “His feelings on turning 30 and a decade of uncertainty before him have always rung true to my own emotions when I was the same age,” said the author. “And I still feel that way much of the time, torn between the revelations of what we discover in life and the abandon of those same discoveries. “The last time I read Gatsby, a few years ago, Nick stayed in my imagination and he reveals so little about himself in the story, I couldn’t help but begin to create him in my mind, and I knew the only way to get it out was to put it on the page. So I embraced the idea and dove into it with all those emotions fuelling the creation.” No Exit promised that Nick would be “charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak and profound yearning to transfix even the heartiest of golden-age scribes”. The prequel will see the character “floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first hand” during the trench warfare of the first world war and embarking “on a redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence”. No Exit’s editor-in-chief, Geoffrey Mulligan, said that Farris Smith’s story was exceptional. “The trenches and the bomb craters are utterly vivid, the silence of the tunnels deafening. And the ending – the clever ending that brought Nick’s story to a close while opening up the world of West Egg – is perfect,” he said.