It Came to Me on a Whim

House of Sweden invites you to a conversation with the Swedish author and economist Maria Bouroncle about It Came to Me on a Whim - A True Crime Story About a Secret Family Tragedy on November 9, 2023 starting at 6:30 pm. This event is free. Register here.

Maria Bouroncle grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, but has lived in Washington, DC since 2002.  
An economist by profession, Bouroncle, devoted more than 25 years to the field of international development before her literary debut in 2018.

It Came to Me on a Whim tells the story of her great-aunt who killed her three children at the age of twenty-seven in 1929. Through exhaustive research, she has strived to shed light on what led up to this tragedy, which had been a tightly guarded family secret for over seventy years. The book has been translated into several languages and is currently used in the Scandinavian Crime Literature course at UCLA.

In 2021, Carl Eneroth's film The Child Murderess of Vesene, based on Maria's book, won the prize for best short documentary in London, Miami and New Jersey. Maria's second book, the independent sequel The Girl with a Name Tag, was published in 2022 and chronicles the story of a Finnish war child in Sweden during the 1940s.

The conversation will be moderated by Manil Suri, bestselling author and former contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. The book talk will focus on how Maria gave up her career at an international bank in Washington DC to follow her passion of writing, starting with the literary true crime story, It Came to Me on a Whim. The conversation will be followed by a book signing.

House of Sweden is located at 2900 K Street in Georgetown.