Eagerly Awaited Publication of Larsson’s Third Book

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, the English language version of the third book in Stieg Larrson’s Millennium Series, is due for release later this year. With more than twelve million copies sold before all the translations from the Swedish are even complete, the Millennium trilogy is a worldwide publishing sensation. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published in English in January 2008 and The Girl Who Played with Fire published in January 2009. Readers have been gripped by the exploits of its heroes, investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and tattooed computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, described by one reviewer as “the coolest crime-fighting sidekick to come along in many years”. Shortly before his death of a heart attack in November 2004, Stieg Larrson, an unknown journalist, delivered the manuscripts of three completed but unpublished novels in a series to his publishers in Stockholm. He was about 100 pages into a fourth book, and according to friends, had a further six in the Millennium series planned in his head. He had written them as a hobby in the evenings after work. The three books went on to sell more than 3 million copies in Sweden alone. The film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opened in Sweden last February and there is much talk about the possibility of an English-language version. The second and third films were originally made for TV, but the first movie has been so successful that both are now being adapted for the cinema.