COVER ART

Complex, brilliant and prophetic. Frank Herbert's award-winning Dune chronicles captured the imaginations of millions of readers worldwide -- and transformed their perception of what the future could be. By his death in 1986, Frank Herbert had completed six novels in the Dune series. But much of his vision -- vast, sprawling, and multilayered -- remained unwritten. Now, working from recently discovered files left by his father, Brian Herbert and bestselling novelist Kevin J. Anderson collaborate on a new novel, the first volume in the prequel to Dune -- where we step onto planet Arrakis -- decades before Dune's hero, Paul Atreides, walks its sands.

An aging tyrant sits on the Golden Lion Throne and rules all of the known universe, while his son grows dangerously impatient for the crown. A quasi-religious order of black-robed women move their secret breeding program one momentous step closer to creating the god-child they call the Kwisatz Haderach. And a minor family among nobility, House Atreides, chooses a course of honor that will bring it to destruction at the hands of its mortal enemy, House Harkonnen -- or take it to new heights of power.

Here is the rich and complex world that Frank Herbert created in his classic series, in the time leading up to the momentous events of Dune. As Emperor Elrood's son Shaddam plots a subtle regicide, young Leto Atreides leaves his lush, water-rich planet for a year's education on the mechanized world of Ix; a planetologist named Pardot Kynes is dispatched by the Emperor to the desert planet Arrakis, or Dune, to discover the secrets of the addictive spice known as melange; and the eight-year-old slave Duncan Idaho is hunted by his cruel masters in a terrifying game from which he vows escape and vengeance. But none can envision the fate in store for them: one that will make them renegades -- and shapers of history.

Covering the decade when Shaddam wins his throne, the teenager Leto Atreides becomes the unexpected ruler of House Atreides, and Pardot Kynes uncovers one of the planet Dune's greatest secrets, House Atreides captures the grandeur and drama of Frank Herbert's epic. And while this new novel solves some of Dune's most baffling mysteries, it presents new puzzles springing from the sands where one day Paul-Muad'dib Atreides, the hero of Dune, will walk. But now, in these years before Paul's birth, an unforgettable new epic begins . . .