A New Translation!

The Housemaid's Daughter continues to leap into new languages!
This one "arrived" last week. And it certainly is impressive because it took the translator only 3 months to finish; the publishing company bought the rights in August and have been hard at it to produce the fully translated version in time for Christmas. Well done to the poor soul who must have laboured night and day to get it done!

And the language?
It's Icelandic. Well now, it seems a very long way from the volcanoes and snows of Iceland to the heat and dust of the Karoo and a small town called Cradock... But perhaps it's not such a stretch? After all, both are extreme environments, both are not for those who want a soft life. Perhaps the readers in Iceland, accustomed to the challenges of their own country, will understand the harshness of the Karoo - and also appreciate its stark beauty.

Translations are strange things for an author to get to grips with. I have been working my way through the recently-published Dutch translation, De Kleur Van Haar Hart. My Dutch is rudimentary, but I can kind of make out what's going on. Even so, you constantly wonder whether your carefully constructed turn of phrase, or the passage you agonised over for days, is actually coming across to the foreign reader in the way you intended.

You may not know an interesting fact that I have discovered about Iceland: it has the highest literacy rate in the world. That's a good omen. It hopefully means that many, many Icelanders love to read. And that means that The Housemaid's Daughter will get a good airing up amongst the fire and ice.
Gangi per vel!

The Housemaid's Daughter in Australia

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have been delighted by the response of Australian booksellers to the publication of The Housemaid's Daughter. They have seen fit to give the book shelf space alongside far more august and better known authors.

Putting a book on a shelf is one thing, but getting review coverage in the media is quite another. So... it was with great eagerness - and some trepidation - that I received a series of book reviews that have been written in the weeks following publication. Here is one of them, from The Saturday Age in Melbourne (circulation, I am reliably informed, of some 240,000). The same review also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald circulation 180,000).

Now, by my calculation, that means there is the possibility that some 400,000 people might very well have read about The Housemaid's Daughter if they happened to page through the newspapers that day. Australia's population is 22 million. That means 2% of the folk down under could have been introduced to the book via those 2 reviews.
Ah well, only 98% to go. Clearly, more work needed!

A Book-of-the-Month in Canada!

Chatelaine, one of Canada's biggest circulation women's magazines, has named The Housemaid's Daughter as its Book-of-the-Month for November. This is wonderful news! If you go to their website Chatelaine.com or follow the link below, you will be able to read an interview we did, and also see an online discussion among readers about the book.
http://www.chatelaine.com/en/blog/chatelaine_book_club/tag/book+review

I have to confess that this is still a strange feeling for me, seeing my words and plots debated like this. But I am hugely grateful because it means that readers care enough about the story to be putting forward their views. Hopefully the book will have enlightened, maybe captivated, or perhaps horrified - but in the end rewarded the reader for spending time with it. For me, it is fascinating to pick up insights from readers' comments, sometimes about aspects that I didn't expect or hadn't intended to arouse interest. Each of us - even the author - brings our own experience to a book and so we each get something different out of it.

With Housemaid, I chose to leave some parts of the story to the reader's imagination, and it is these deliberate omissions that have given rise to lively debate, like that shown in the Chatelaine discussion above. Phil's death, Dawn's life in Johannesburg, what might have happened to Jake, have all proved to be strong discussion points. What did you wonder about?

My Canadian adventure is soon to take a further turn.
Coming up shortly in the National Post newspaper will be a series of blogs that I have written about the book and its background. They will run from Monday to Friday in the paper. Watch this space...