Author: Chiara Stanziani

Spooky season is almost upon us and this year it’s extra special.

That’s because Raspberry Hill, the mini series based on The Mystery Of Raspberry Hill – a thrilling title for middle grade readers by Eva Frantz, already sold to seven territories and counting – is about to drop, and the trailer is already out.

The Mystery Of Raspberry Hill follows Stina, a twelve-year-old girl with a lung disease, as she is sent to a mysterious sanatorium in the middle of nowhere in the 1920s. The place is gorgeous but something unsettling is afoot: why are so many patients disappearing into thin air? Why isn’t anyone allowed contact with the outside world? And why does her mysterious new best friend only appear at night?

The series has set great expectations: Variety has dedicated it an exclusive feature , praising the fact that it is contributing to fill the gap for darker series that are suitable for young audiences.

This resulted in a challenge for the production team, thus quoted in Variety: “The task was to maintain the same level of horror as in the book. In my experience, pre-teens and teens love to be scared. And since the end of the story is happy and hopeful, there is room for dark shades before that.”

Congratulations to the author and the production team, and fingers crossed!

Can’t wait? Read more about the story here. But whatever you do, don’t miss out on this series!

More exciting news for our children’s list: The Senior Squad by Malin Klingenberg has been sold to Azerbaijan, where it will be published by Alatoran.

This marks the second foreign sale for the series, which has previously been sold to Bulgaria. The series follows Patrik, a quiet school boy whose life is suddenly turned upside down.

The class tearaway, Irene, bullies Patrik into escaping from school. When he ends up on a wrong bus full of pensioners, things seem a bit awkward but then take an exciting turn. It appears that one of the senior citizens has been kidnapped and a group of villains are very interested in taking the other pensioners out of the game as well…

Patrik and The Senior Squad is the first book in a series of six novels for middle-grade readers, praised for their crazy humour, quirky characters and action-filled plots. The five books already published have been a huge Finland-
Swedish success and have since been translated into Finnish and loved just as much.

The series consists of six titles:
Patrick and the Senior Squad
The Senior Squad #2, Irene and the Moneyhoover
The Senior Squad #3, Fake Bernice
The Senior Squad #4, Fantastic Alfredo
The Senior Squad #5, Rakel’s Miracle  
The Senior Squad #6, The Magnificent Senior Match

Warm congratulations to the author!

Fantastic news for the Anna Glad series by Eva Frantz: all four books in the series have made it to Storytel’s top 50.

The Anna Glad series has recently welcomed its fourth instalment, You Will Not Take My Child, where police officer Anna Glad is juggling her roles as a parent of a toddler and a senior detective. There are several suspicious deaths happening around the city, a school secretary is missing and something is at odds at the closed school building, soon to be demolished. And what exactly is going on with the family of her son’s playground best friend?

The Anna Glad series is a skilful series of crime novels where the inhabitants of a small town are divided and bound together by the secrets of the past. In Finland alone the three first books of the series have sold over 55,000 copies.

Warm congratulations to the author!

Exciting news from France: To My Brother by E.L. Karhu has been nominated for the Prix Médicis. The Médicis Prize is an international literary prize, established in 1958 and awarded every year to a domestic work of fiction, a foreign work of fiction and a work of non-fiction.

E.L. Karhu ‘s novel To My Brother has been published in France, with the title A mon frère, by La Peuplade in a translation by Claire Saint-Germain. The winner of the Prix Médicis will be announced on November 9 in Paris.

Congratulations to all nominees, and fingers crossed!

One of Estonia’s top publishing houses, Tänapäev, has acquired the lauded debut Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen.

Helsinki Literary Agency’s top book of autumn 2023, Iida Turpeinen‘s Beasts of the Sea, has been sold to Tänapäev in Estonia. It will be published in Tänapäev’s series called The Red Book, featuring such autors as the Nobel Prize winners Annie Ernaux, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Peter Handke, as well as modern literary classics such as George Saunders, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Hervé Le Tellier and Kurt Vonnegut. The only other title from Finland to have made it to the series before is Our Earthly Life, by Riikka Pelo.

Tauno Vahter, the publisher of Tänäpäev, has described Beasts Of The Sea as follows:

“Beasts of the Sea is an adventurous novel about mankind and nature, one that gives food for thought. The theme running through this relatively small book is the inevitable changing of the world, which is at times tragic, but at times, strangely, also tragicomic. The novel will attract the readers of Daniel Kehlmann’s Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World) and Richard Powers’ Overstory.”

Turpeinen’s novel was published in Finland only a few weeks ago and got a raving review in the largest newspaper of the country, Helsingin Sanomat, stating that the book is a “world-class novel” that “focuses on a single sea cow and individuals linked to it over a span of three centuries, makes the ecological ruptures and freefall of the entire world into a palpable experience”.

In 1741, naturalist and theologist Georg Wilhelm Steller joins the Great Northern Expedition, as Captain Vitus Bering and his crew scout out a sea route from Asia to America. Although they never reach the American mainland, they make a unique discovery: the Steller’s sea cow.

It is the start of a 200-year-long quest, and a story of natural diversity through individual destinies, of grand human ambitions and of the urge to resurrect what humankind in its ignorance has destroyed.

Warmest congratulations to the author!