A follow-up to the 2003 blockbuster novel The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is set to be published this autumn.

Life Out of Order, which Niffenegger worked on for 13 years, is set in the same world as the original novel. The Time Traveler’s Wife has sold more than 9m copies globally since its publication, and was adapted into a 2009 film starring Rachel McAdams, as well as an HBO series and a musical.

The new book – due to be published on 27 October by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin, in the UK – is about the life of Alba DeTamble, the daughter of Henry and Clare, who are the characters at the centre of the original novel.

Niffenegger wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife between 1997 and 2002, and “had no intention of writing any kind of sequel”. It was only years later that she had an idea for a follow-up story about Alba, which she began in November 2012.

In the Time Traveler’s Wife, we learn that Henry has “Chrono-Displacement Disorder”, meaning he involuntarily travels through time, always arriving naked at his destination. Alba inherits the condition. In the original book, Henry dies when Alba is five.

The sequel is partly about love – the “seed” of the book is Alba having two husbands, Zach and Oliver – in two different time periods, with an overlap – says Niffenegger.

When Niffenegger began writing the sequel, Obama had just been re-elected; it was “a different world”. As she continued writing, “the world around me was changing quite a lot, and the book started getting more and more political”.

Alba was born six days before 9/11, so Niffenegger realised that if she wanted to write about her protagonist as an adult, she would need to “take some guesses” about what the future might be like. “I thought, OK, that’s probably got a lot to do with climate change. So I started writing in that direction, and of course it rapidly turned into a dystopia, and then I thought, well, let’s bring some politics to bear on this situation. But I would put something in the book, and then it would happen in real life, and that got to be distressing. And then 2016 came and just blew everything up. Alba’s dystopia and my dystopia started looking similar.”

Alba is a violinist and composer, so “something that keeps popping its head up here and there is, well, if the world’s going to shit, why make art? But my own feeling about that is that we make things for ourselves, and we make them for other people, and we make them to connect, and to document our thinking, and sometimes change our own minds. So, even if you knew the world was imploding tomorrow, you should still get out there and make things and do things.” Niffenegger is hoping the book “encourages people to be more ‘out there’, more active, in art, in politics, in their lives”.

In Life Out of Order, Alba “is haunted by secrets she must keep from those she loves most, including Zach, her supportive anchor in the chaos, and Oliver, a fellow time traveller and musician,” reads the publisher’s description of the book. “Her journey takes her from the riots of Chicago’s streets to the eerie refuge of the Yellow House, to the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls, a virtual sanctuary of forgotten memories and lost artefacts.”

Niffenegger “had always thought a female time traveller would have a rough time running around in her nakedity and just getting harassed all the time”, she explains. “And then I thought, what if she had a place that was secluded, that was her own?” – much like the meadow in the original book, which is a meeting place for Henry and Clare. In the sequel, Alba is drawn to the Yellow House when she time travels – a Victorian-era property she has owned since before she was born, located in the Ravenswood neighbourhood of Chicago.

The author described writing Life Out of Order as “all-consuming”, but said she will miss “living in it”.

The Time Traveler’s Wife “was one of the most significant literary publications in history,” said Hannah Westland, publisher at Jonathan Cape. Life Out of Order is “uncannily of this moment” and a “profoundly moving celebration of love”. Vintage, the imprint of Penguin that oversees Jonathan Cape, will also publish new paperback and hardback editions of the original book this year.