People often ask me why The Messenger is sometimes listed as I am the Messenger.

These two titles are exactly the same book, and the difference came only out of necessity in the USA. The book had already been out in Australia for more than a year, and the problem we had in America was that another book called Messenger was being released at the same time, with the same publisher. The author was Lois Lowry, author of The Giver. At the time, when I was asked to change it, I was pretty haughty (at least in my conjured-up internal conversations) and vowed that I didn’t care if fifty people were putting a book out with the same title. I even considered a more radical change to call it either The Joker or The Gambler. That would have meant a considerable rewrite, though, and that’s something you want to avoid when a book has already been published, as The Messenger was here at home. Still, with about eight years of hindsight, I quite like both titles. That said, if the same thing was to happen now, I’d probably be a bit more obstinate.

As a final piece of trivia, The Messenger was published as Der Joker in Germany. In some countries (Brazil is an example), the publisher used I am the Messenger as the title because they felt it sounded better or more poetic in that particular language.