The Wedding Shoes

Rural Sweden was a beautiful place in 1889 when Edvard and Inga came of age and planned to get married. The countryside around their farm town of Kisa was breathtaking and serene. Their lives were filled with customs and traditions, folklore and mythology, common wisdom and an expectation of a birthright.

They didn't expect a lot — just the same lives their families had lived for generations. But life has changed. The population has soared. The industrial revolution has altered the social order. Peasant farmers are at the bottom of the economic ladder and most are dirt poor.

Edvard and Inga find their options are very bleak. To begin their life together they will have to do something drastic — something they would never have considered. Reluctantly, they join the waves of Swedes emigrating to America. But the "promised land" doesn't fulfill all of its promises. Everything that could go wrong for the young couple does go wrong.

David Perry Snelling was born on a 16-below-zero day in Chicago after World War II. He was raised near Los Angeles, running barefoot through the orange groves during his summers in the 1950s.

A graduate of Long Beach State, where he was the editor of the daily campus newspaper, he studied journalism and history. As a reporter and editor he observed and absorbed events as history was being made, starting in the turbulent '60s. He worked on three metropolitcan newspapers and covered natural disasters, law enforcement, government, politics, presidents and foreign leaders. He has traveled abroad extensively and lived for a time in Switzerland.

As he grew up, he was surrounded by a large extended family of Swedish aunts and uncles. His desire to understand why his great grandparents left Sweden in 1879 led to his latest novel, The Wedding Shoes.

Married with two grown children, he splits his time between homes near San Diego and on Camano Island north of Seattle.

His previous novel, Dateline, about an inheritance struggle within a wealthy newspaper family, was released in 2012.