The New Year has brought its first major change for novelist Tom Wolfe: the end of a 40-year-long collaboration with Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the beginning of work with Little, Brown and Co.

The announcement that Tom Wolfe, 76, would make this move came Wednesday. He is currently working on a new novel, titled “Back to Blood,” which is scheduled for publication in 2009.

Wolfe is among the original “New Journalists” of the 1960s. He is known for best-selling novels such as “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987) and “A Man in Full” (1998) and for non-fiction classics such as “The Right Stuff” (1979) and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968).

According to the Associated Press, Wolfe’s forthcoming novel is to be a “Bonfire”-like tour of Miami, dealing with issues such as “class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption, and ambition.” Among the characters readers will be introduced to are a Cuban nurse married to a French sex doctor, a Haitian woman “who passes for Anglo” and “a freshman journalist on the trail of a Russian-mob-comes-to-Miami story.”

“The opportunity to work with the American master Tom Wolfe is the kind of thrill and challenge that people entering book publishing dream of,” Little, Brown Publisher Michael Pietsch said Wednesday.

As for Wolfe’s old-time collaborators, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, with whom he has been working since the mid-1960s, they expressed their best wishes for the best-selling author.

“Tom Wolfe is one of the great writers of his generation and he has been one of FSG's most significant and best-loved authors,” Farrar publisher Jonathan Galassi said. “We are sorry to part company, and wish him all happiness and success in this next phase of his work.”

His first book, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” was published through Farrar, Strauss in 1965.

While Wolfe’s last novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” did not enjoy the expected sales or positive critical comments, the author’s new publisher was apparently eager to welcome him. The New York Time cites people involved in the negotiations who said on Wednesday that Wolfe’s advance for the new book was close to $7 million.

Wolfe's agent, Lynn Nesbit, said the parting “wasn't at all acrimonious,” reports the AP. “It's an exciting way to start the new year,” Nesbit added. “He's feeling very energized.”