After doing some rigorous editing, Kenneth and Talita Paolini, who had experience self-publishing educational books, decided to publish Eragon on their own in 2002. They then spent a year traveling the country with their son, doggedly promoting it at schools, libraries and grocery stores. Even Christopher's younger sister, Angela, helped out.

The Paolinis sold more than 10,000 copies of the book before it came to the attention of author Carl Hiassen, whose stepson read it while vacationing in Montana. Hiassen passed it on to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, which published Eragon in 2003. It has gone on to sell 2.5 million copies in North America alone and is available in 38 countries.

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"Eragon is a coming-of-age story and this whole process of publishing and writing books has been, in a lot of ways, my own coming-of-age story," he says. "I had to leave home and go out into the world. And while I didn't have to get involved in any sword battles, I was placed under a certain amount of pressure." Make that a great deal of pressure. During the year his family spent promoting the book on the road, his parents had no other income. Eragon, essentially, was their meal ticket.

"I was doing three or four presentations a day, and it was a do-or-die sort of thing," Paolini recalls. "It makes for a great story after the fact, but when you're living through it, it's incredibly nerve-racking. I never want to be in that position again. There was just too much at stake."

"Well, the landscape here in Paradise Valley in Montana where I live has had a huge impact on what I've written. I don't think that I could have written the Inheritance Trilogy if I had lived in a different area, or if I had written it, it would have been completely different.

"When I look out my window I see this fantastic landscape of the Beartooth mountains, which are just extraordinary, and they provide constant inspiration for me. I hike and climb and spend a lot of time outdoors, and what I see and what I feel and all the observations I make when I'm outside, inform my writing, they really do inspire me."

"And I don't think that you can just imagine these things just out of thin air, you have to actually be out in the forest and smell the trees and feel the moss under your feet and know what that's like in order to describe it properly."

"Many of the characters that readers were introduced to in book 1, Eragon, return in Eldest, some don't, for various reasons, but readers can also expect to encounter a whole array of new characters, lots of new elves and dwarves, and there's even a red dragon, which appears on the cover of the second book. And if readers keep their eyes open they may even see another weird cat lurking around in the corners of the story."