The Girl Who Played with Fire
First edition (Swedish)
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| Author | Stieg Larsson |
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| Original title | Flickan som lekte med elden |
| Translator | Reg Keeland (pseudonym of Steven T. Murray) |
| Country | Sweden |
| Language | Swedish |
| Series | Millennium |
| Genre | Crime, mystery, thriller |
| Publisher | Norstedts Förlag (Swedish), Quercus (English) |
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Publication date
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June 2006 (Sweden), 2009 (United Kingdom) |
| Media type | Print (Paperback & Hardback) |
| Pages | 631 |
| Preceded by | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo |
| Followed by | The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest |
The Girl Who Played with Fire (Swedish: Flickan som lekte med elden) is the second novel in the best-selling Millennium series by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. It was published posthumously in Swedish in 2006 and in English in January 2009.
The book features many of the characters who appeared in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), among them the title character, Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant computer hacker and social misfit, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine.
Widely seen as a critical success, The Girl Who Played with Fire was also (according to The Bookseller magazine) the first and only translated novel to be number one in the UK hardback chart.
The novel is formally divided into a prologue followed by four parts. The prologue of the book opens with a girl captured and restrained inside a dark room by an unidentified male. To cope with being captured, she mentally replays a past episode when she threw a milk carton filled with gasoline onto another man inside a car and tossed an ignited match onto him.
After finishing the job on the Wennerström affair (described in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Lisbeth Salander disappeared from Sweden and traveled throughout Europe. The novel opens with her on the shores of the Caribbean in St George's, the capital of Grenada. Salander has become interested in Fermat's Last Theorem and mathematics, an interest that resounds with the opening page of each Part in this novel. From within her room in her hotel she observes on several occasions that her neighbor, Dr Forbes, an American tourist from Texas, physically abuses his wife, in the next room to Salander's. Salander also befriends George Bland, a 16-year-old orphaned student living in a small shack and begins tutoring him in mathematics. Salander finds Bland's company relaxing and enjoyable because Bland does not ask her personal questions, and the two develop a sexual relationship.
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Wikipedia