Kevin Costner’s THE EXPLORERS GUILD To Hit Shelves At The End Of October

Kevin Costner fans have been waiting on The Explorers Guild Volume One: A Passage to Shambhala for a long, long time. Well, now it’s time to rejoice – because the wait is almost over. Publishers Simon And Schuster will release the book (co-written with Jon Baird and illustrated by Rick Ross) at the end of October. Check out the book’s cover below.

I spoke with Costner in 2013 on the set of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and he laid-out his plans for the adventure tale…

I have this thing called Explorers Guild that Simon & Schuster, the publisher, just bought that I hope can be the first novel that the world reads together electronically.

What I mean by that is I’m gonna do animation, I hope, and if I’m right it’ll be about 200 or 300 hours because each book is gonna be about 600 or 700 pages long. It’s very much like Jules Verne and Arabian Nights, it’s in the greatest form of storytelling. And so my idea would be you’re sitting on the bench and you go, “I’m gonna catch up with Explorers Guild,” you hit your pad and you watch 22 minutes of animation so you’re basically reading the novel together. There’s no source material so you won’t read it until I put it out, and so actually you follow this book and it’s not something that suddenly becomes popular and turns inward on itself and you go, “Oh God how do we keep this thing going?” It is a book, it’s just you don’t know it yet. It’s being written right now and there’ll be five volumes and it’s called Explorers Guild.

Here’s the synopsis:

The golden age of adventure stories returns with this splendidly designed, action-packed, globe-trotting tale that combines the bravura storytelling of Kipling with the irresistible style of The Adventures of Tintin.

Behind the staid public rooms of an old world gentlemen’s club operates a more mysterious organization: The Explorers Guild, a clandestine group of adventurers who bravely journey to those places in which light gives way to shadow and reason is usurped by myth. The secrets they seek are hidden in mountain ranges and lost in deserts, buried in the ocean floor and lodged deep in polar ice. The aim of The Explorers Guild: to discover the mysteries that lie beyond the boundaries of the known world.

Set against the backdrop of World War I, with Western Civilization on the edge of calamity, the first installment in The Explorers Guild series, A Passage to Shambhala, concerns the Guild’s quest to find the golden city of Buddhist myth. The search will take them from the Polar North to the Mongolian deserts, through the underground canals of Asia to deep inside the Himalayas, before the fabled city finally divulges its secrets and the globe-spanning journey plays out to its startling conclusion.

The Explorers Guild is a rare publishing opportunity, powered by the creative passion of one of the world’s true storytelling masters, Kevin Costner.

Keep reading Movies In Focus for more on The Explorers Guild.