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This novel is set in Sweden and China. As a consequence the names of persons and places will be unfamiliar to most of you. I hope you have fun with them.
For those of you who are interested, the Swedish letter Å or å is pronounced like the 'au' in 'autumn' or the 'a' in 'water'; Ä or ä is pronounced like the 'e' in 'bed' although it can be long, like the 'a' in 'spare'; and Ö or ö sounds like 'ir' in 'bird', although you should purse your lips as you say it.
I have also included some simple Mandarin words or phrases, and these are presented using pinyin, which is a method of using western letters with some more or less familiar-looking accents to indicate how they should be pronounced. The meaning of these words is hopefully clear from the context. I leave it to you how you cope with internally voicing them. Purists, though, will disapprove of the fact that, in the mobi version, I have shown them without tonal accents. The problem was that not all ebook readers can display the accented letters properly. Kindles cannot, for example, so the mobi version does not include them.
My thanks to Nancy Yip, who first gave me the idea for this story, and subsequently was an unfailin
The lines didn't wrap, but you see how shitty the paragraph indents look.