Our August Author

A few links for our August author, Jo Nesbø, and our August selection, The Redbreast.

Random House has a reader's guide with a short interview,

What could get you arrested?

You mean; what got me arrested? Well, dropping my pants and mooning for a passing police car when I was eighteen. A bit drunk and nothing I'm very proud of, but it gave me the chance to do some research. I know what the inside of a cell looks like.

And here's a Washington Post profile with some insight into the author's literary influences and the novel's Norwegian roots,

For instance, this sentence is making a sort of class judgment about a character: "Meirik was from Tromso and spoke a strangely haphazard mixture of Tromso dialect and standard Norwegian."

But unless you know Norwegian geography, and know that Nynorsk and Bokmal are the two official languages of the country — and whatever one you speak says something about where you grew up — the detail would zip right past most readers.

Finally, this BBC item suggests the reality behind one of the novel's themes.