ARC Arrival: Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti

Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti

Publisher: Penguin

About the book: Two middle-aged misfits and a love that should not be as complicated as it seems.

It started in a cemetery, where they begrudgingly share a bench. "Shrimp," the childless young widow and librarian with a sharp intellect and a home so tidy that her jam jars are in alphabetical order, meets Benny, the gentle, overworked milk farmer who fears becoming the village's Old Bachelor. Both driven by an enormous longing and loudly ticking biological clocks, they can't escape the powerful attraction between them.

But how will she learn to accept that he falls asleep at the opera and has a house full of his mother's cross-stitch? And how could he ever feel at home in her minimalist apartment, bare as a dentist's waiting room?

An international sensation now available for the first time in the United States, this quirky, humorous, completely readable novel breathes new life into the age-old conundrum that is love. (book flap)

About the author: Katarina Mazetti was nominated for the Prix Cevennes in France in 2007, and has worked as a journalist, teacher, and author of books for readers of all ages. For twenty years she lived on a small farm in northern Sweden, an experience that became the basis for Benny & Shrimp, her first adult novel. (book flap)

Benny & Shrimp
Publisher/Publication Date: Penguin, July 2009
ISBN: 978-0-14-311599-1
224 pages