The first two installments of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, had come thundering into American bookstores in 20 respectively, and I had a small group of clients who were chomping at the bit for the third. It would be another year before I really began to more fully recognize the quality of the foreign literature they were purchasing as a house.

Happy as I was with my acquisition, I didn’t really give Quercus much more than an appreciative thought at the time. They shipped it right to the door of my house. Two more clicks of the mouse, and I was at the webpage for Waterstones (the British equivalent of Barnes & Noble or the now defunct Borders) placing my order. Not only did they offer a very nice cloth edition of Let the Right One In that featured original dust jacket artwork that reflected, perfectly, the dusky and haunting nature of the novel, but ordering it couldn’t have been easier. This is when I found Quercus, a thriving (and intelligent) publishing house that seemed to have a robust hand in translating quality foreign language literature into the English. Worse, the available trade paperback seemed to have abandoned any original artistry in favor of cheap film tie-in artwork. Seeking out the novel of the same title, by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who many readers seemed to consider the Stephen King of Sweden), I was disappointed to find that it wasn’t being marketed in the United States in a cloth edition, which I much prefer. It was, of course, Tomas Alfredson’s Lat den ratte komma in, or Let the Right One In. In 2008, my wife and I saw an extremely clever, character-driven vampire film made in Sweden that featured some of the most visually striking cinematography that I’d seen in the theatre in years. Although their debut title, a French thriller called Alex, will certainly strike American readers with the precision and impact of a well-placed bolt of lightning, my affection for all things Quercus took hold long before they translated Pierre Lemaitre’s brutal spectacle of a book into English. This fall, Random House will begin distributing titles in the United States by a British publisher named Quercus.

Alex lemaitre