Holiday reading

I received this email recently from a woman who came across my novella Airmail in an East Berlin youth hostel. It just made my heart sing. "I am staying at a youth hostel in East Berlin and stumbled across a copy of your book. I am a forty year-old woman traveling with my son, and readily identified with Mr Solomon's bemusement when he first enters the hostel (it was my first time staying at a hostel!)...

"Being forty this year was hard for me and I too am traveling and gathering more marbles. It's not so much that I haven't lived an adventuresome life, it's just that suddenly your life seems so much shorter while the list of things you want to do grows bigger, and you realize that you have spent the last 10 years of your life raising kids and working. (could this be what a mid-life crisis is all about......duh)

"It's amazing how at certain critical points in your life the right book or the right experience occurs. Your book is part of that for me. Today I walked past some graffiti on the side of a cafe - 'Life is not over yet' it read."

Wasn't that nice of this woman to write and tell me? I don't think there's anything that could make me happier as an author than to learn that my book was "the right book" in someone's life. Oh so happy.