Breakfast with Oksa Pollock

A fine start to the day: breakfast with the authors of the internationally best-selling children's book series about a girl called Oksa Pollock. In an underground room at the Covent Garden hotel, we ate quail's eggs benedict, bacon sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and miniature blueberry muffins. The book is published in England by Pushkin Press, who are also launching their first children's list this year.

The Oksa Pollock series has been translated into 26 languages already, and English is its 27th - as the authors, a pair of delightful ladies called Anne Pilchota and Cendrine Wolf pointed out, it is a dream for them, as the series is set in London. It concerns a young girl who discovers that she has magical powers; and that her family has been exiled from a magical, parallel realm.

The book was initially self-published (there are echoes here of the Eragon series), with the authors hawking their novel around bookshops in a wheelbarrow, although the novels had arrived at the Covent Garden hotel via more conventional means.

Bienvenue, Mlle. Pollock, et bonne chance!