Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar - Hardcover

Olga Wojtas was born and raised in Edinburgh, but canny readers will have spotted her lack of a traditional Scottish name. Her father was in fact one of the Polish soldiers who settled in the UK after the Second World War, and her mother was a teacher assigned to teach the soldiers English. Olga attended James Gillespie's High School (the same school that Muriel Spark went to and later immortalized in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), where she fell in love with Russian literature: Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar was inspired in roughly equal parts by Muriel Spark and Leo Tolstoy. After graduating from the University of Aberdeen, Olga became a journalist, eventually working in England, France, and Washington, DC, as well as in Scotland. Though she has had more than 30 short stories published in literary magazines and anthologies, Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar is her first novel. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, Alistair. If you are lucky enough to meet her, ask her to tell you about Wojtek the bear.