Kristina Olsson's second novel, The China Garden, has been chosen as the April selection for the "Courier-Mail" Big Book Club. The author is interviewed in the paper by Madeline Healy.
That Olsson has written a story of an "odd or lost boy" should not surprise. Her mother Yvonne, on the run from her abusive husband, had her first child Peter snatched from her arms by his father on a train when he was one. The family did not see Peter again until he was 37. He later contracted polio and faced challenges."In all of the writing I've done there's been an odd boy, a boy missing someone," Olsson says. "Because there has been missing boys in my family. I guess it's a way of bringing them home for me; it's a preoccupation."
The story of her brother Peter will be told in Olsson's next book, a memoir tentatively titled Lost Boys, which traces the lives of Yvonne and her family.
But The China Garden, Olsson says, was the book she had to write before the memoir, while she gathered permission to write Lost Boys after her mother died in 2001. "I couldn't write my mother's story as fiction -- it needed to be non-fiction and I needed to talk to all of the family before I did that," Olsson says.
