Peter Berlin left his native Sweden the day after graduating from university, and has always looked back since. He maintains that you have to go abroad to view your country in perspective, for how can one size up a whale from within? Of course, Sweden is not a whale but a slightly fermented herring, usually delectable but sometimes hard to swallow.

His Canadian wife, a textile artist, has given him a wider focus on Sweden. When there, she roams the forests in search of mushrooms for dyeing wool and places each day's harvest on the hotel room radiator to dry overnight, slowly asphyxiating her husband in the process.

But there is life in the author yet. After 25 years in the satellite and rocket business, he recently took early retirement in order to become a full-time writer. His previous oevres include bedside reading about the use of Bessel Functions in the Study of Spacecraft Oscillations Around Pockets in the Gravitational Field Along the Geostationary Orbit, as well as DIY manual on how to love the French. He also gives seminars in Cross-Cultural Awareness.

To prove their theory that if you marry a foreigner you should live in a third country (because you both become expatriates with all the attendant joys and sorrows), the Berlins have lived in Seattle, The Hague, Paris, Toulouse, Darmstadt, London and Moscow.

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