Dan Brown's Inferno set to be blockbusting bestseller of the year

Booksellers have predicted that Inferno will attract the biggest, and fastest, sales of the year

Dan Brown's last novel,The Lost Symbol, sold more than half a million hardback copies in the first week of its release in 2009. Waterstones said it had received more advance orders for Inferno than for any title since the publication of J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy.

Reported in the Guardian, Waterstones' fiction buyer Chris White said: 'It's hard to see how anything could beat it . . . It could well be No 1 on 25 December.'

Dan Brown has only given one interview, to the Sunday Times, to promote the book, whose plot has been kept a closely guarded secret. Saying that Inferno was his 'darkest novel yet,' he continued with: 'I'm not writing about the masons and ancient histories, which is kind of ethereal. I'm writing about Dante's vision of hell … It wasn't until the 1300s and this version of Inferno that it became terrifying. Dante has had enormous influence on the Christian view of hell.'

He also responded to criticisms of his writing style. 'I personally don't like language getting in the way. I don't want to read things where I'm just drowning in the prose,' he said. ' I try to write – as clearly as possible so you don't have to read a sentence twice.'

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