Here in the U.S., Tranströmer's English translations include The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer), The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (New Directions), The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (Graywolf), For the Living and the Dead: A Memoir and Poems (Ecco) and Selected Poems: 1954-1986 (Ecco). At the Nobel ceremony, 'I imagine he'll be in a wheelchair, and he will speak to people through the piano.' The scramble has begun internationally to track down Tranströmer's books.

Astley told the Independent that the author often expresses himself through music. Tranströmer suffered a stroke two decades ago, which affected his ability to speak, though he has continued to write.

You were not allowed to turn your head away. Something swelled up from below, mounted slowly, inexorably, like mercury in a gigantic thermometer. With that act I had let in the underworld. It stood empty a few days, empty until I filled it with books, all the bound ones, those bulky tomes. Maile Meloy’s debut novel for children is a scintillating page-turner featuring wonderfully appealing characters in a story of adventure and mystery firmly grounded in the tense political climate of the 1950s.It was brought from the dead woman's apartment. The trio tracks down the members of the nuclear containment group, including Benjamin’s dad, and discover they are planning to test their containment theory when the Soviets detonate a newly developed bomb in a remote area of the North Sea. He has left them The Pharmacopoeia, a centuries-old book of magic and potions, and they use some of its simpler spells-like transforming into birds-to elude capture from agents on all sides. Janie and Benjamin learn all this while on the run with Pip-a savvy street kid-after Benjamin’s father disappears. Neither Eastern nor Western Bloc governments are happy about this discovery.

It turns out that Benjamin’s dad, an apothecary, is part of a small international group working to counter the nuclear threat to the world by using sophisticated magic to contain a nuclear explosion. But they aren’t prepared to see the man pass a note to Benjamin’s father. Janie’s anger at moving soon gives way to curiosity: Benjamin Burrows, a boy at her new school, is convinced that the Soviet diplomat father of one of their classmates is involved in some sort of intrigue and invites Janie to spy on the man with him. An immensely satisfying historical fantasy set during the Cold War opens as fourteen-year-old Janie’s family flees to London because her parents, Hollywood writers, were about to be called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Benjamin burrows the apothecary