How a fluffy Romanian stray dog ends up in London and ...in a book

The lesson of this story? Follow your heart and adopt a dog.

The Gaudeamus book fair in Bucharest is disheartening for people who have a very specific goal and very little time to achieve it. The place is big, fairly badly organized and it can take a while to find a book launch. Luckily, Arabella McIntyre-Brown, the person I am looking for, is wearing a large, pink hat which can be easily spotted in the crowd. Arabella is a British writer and publisher, who launched a bilingual children’s book called “Floss the Lost Puppy” at the Gaudeamus fair end-November. Arabella has been living in the last years in a remote village in the mountains of Transylvania. We somehow manage to find two empty seats at an improvised fast food within the book fair. I grab a coffee, Arabella goes for a bottle of water, and we start chatting about the book, surrounded by a lot of kids. “The dog’s story is true. I invented for the benefit of the story Thea, who’s the central character. She’s scared of dogs,” says Arabella.