Kate Evans

Where Tuva lives, a couple of hours north of where I am, they have bears.

They have wolverines.

They have more wolves, and the wolves attack dogs on a fairly regular basis.

Up there, the hunt, the annual elk hunt,

is a huge part of the local community people take days off work people take their kids out of school to participate in the hunt so i wanted to put Tuva there because you know a lot of Sweden is actually just really cosmopolitan and easy to live in you know if you go to Stockholm it's like probably like being in Sydney or in LA but if you're up north in one of these really cut off places

that does have these extreme winters where you can get just so much snow that it's difficult to deal with the amount of weight on your roofs and you have to get them cleared regularly through the winter, that kind of thing.

Then Tuva being a city person, she is just way out of her depth.

And that's interesting to read about.

And it enables the reader, I think, to kind of walk a little way in her shoes because most readers aren't from that kind of life either.

That's a great, great question.

That's really integral to the way I write these books, actually.

I'm fascinated by folklore and fairy tales anyway, from all over the world.

But here in Sweden, through having a Swedish wife and having our son, who's half Swedish, it's enabled me to see that folklore and those fairy tales with fresh eyes.

So that finds its way through all of my stories.

And I think wherever you're somewhere that is quite extreme...

in vast forests, in mountainous regions, places where you have to rely on your neighbor and your community, then that sense of place shapes your life and it shapes your everyday existence and it shapes my books that are rooted there.

And I think folklore and fairy tale, they're just exciting.

You know, my books have been likened to Twin Peaks and True Detective and Fargo.

And in a way, they're also rooted in that kind of extreme location, extreme situation.

It's like with novels, it's like Stephen King's books around Castle Rock.