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Hi, Keith. Thanks for writing. I’m flattered that you’ve paid such close attention to my books over the years.

To your first question, I was a pretty young kid back then, living in the Toronto area. I hadn’t traveled much, so most of my references were Toronto-centric. I guess that makes those books more Canadian – although I’m not sure if a reader from Vancouver would recognize any more than one from Houston or even Oslo would. And as I’ve gotten older, my experiences have broadened and so have the settings and references is my writing. 

As for the “odd edits,” my publishers have encouraged me to tweak certain details as the books have been reprinted over the years. A lot of these have been technology updates – computers and cellphones, which wouldn’t have been part of Macdonald Hall life in 1978 when Bruno and Boots first appeared. We also tried to avoid references to places that had become geopolitically charged. During my high school years when I wrote OUR MAN WESTON, Libya was just a distant country. Years later, it had become a global hot spot, so the idea of buying someone a plane ticket there meant something substantially different than what I’d originally intended. Does that make sense?

——–Gordon Korman——–