Last week, Penguin was kind enough to invite me out to breakfast with Linda Olsson, the author of Astrid & Veronika. We met at the Park Avenue townhouse of Swedish consul general Ulf Hjertonsson—who’s quite the literary type himself, having translated the poems of Pablo Neruda during an earlier diplomatic posting in the 1970s—and I chatted with Olsson about how she started writing her surprise bestseller in a creative writing class at Auckland University. “I submitted the first draft at midterm,” she recalled, “and I got it back with notes all over it, telling me what I should change. I went back and argued with him about each one. In the end, I didn’t take many of his suggestions, but he still approached me at the end of the class and said, ‘I really think you should try to get this published.'” The novel debuted with Penguin’s New Zealand branch in 2005 as Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs, and has since appeared in Sweden, the Netherlands, and here, with UK publication in a month or so, to be followed by a German edition entitled Die Dorfhexe (The Village Witch). Admit it: All those different titles have got you curious!
(Yes, the picture of Olsson and Hjertonsson is a bit blurry; unused to being up at such an early hour, I forgot to bring my real camera with me and had to resort to my cell phone.)