Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published in Sweden on 1 August 2005, and translated into English in 2008, becoming an international bestseller.
With the exception of the fictional Hedestad, the novel takes place in actual Swedish towns. Journalist, Mikael Blomkvist is hired to investigate a murder that occurred forty years ago. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel. It is the first book of the Millennium series, originally a trilogy by Larsson. The series was expanded to another three books by David Lagercrantz, and as of 2021 rights had been sold to pen three more.
In the original language, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo won Sweden’s Glass Key Award in 2006 for best crime novel of the year and has received numerous other awards since. The Guardian included it in its list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. An international publishing sensation, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sold more than 30 million copies by 2010.
Karl Stig-Erland “Stieg” Larsson (1954–2004) was a Swedish writer, journalist, and activist. He is best known for the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously, starting in 2005, after he died of a sudden heart attack. For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm. His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.
He was the second-best-selling fiction author in the world in 2008, owing to the success of the English translation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The third and final novel in the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, became the bestselling book in the United States in 2010, according to Publishers Weekly. By March 2015, his series had sold 80 million copies worldwide.
