Amanda Kerschen asked Chris Pavone:

What motivated you to base The Expats in Luxembourg? My ancestors are from there and I really enjoyed reading about it.

Chris Pavone I set The Expats in Luxembourg because I was an expat in Luxembourg, where my wife had a job. Luxembourg is a tremendously expat-y place because of the E.U. and the banks and the tax environment; there’s a disproportionate community of temporary foreigners, very heavily European. Plus a lot of frontaliers from Belgium, France, and Germany--seemingly many of them Portuguese--stream into Lux every day to work. So the place seemed like pan-Europe to me, where any person I encountered was just as likely to be from England or Sweden or the Netherlands as from Lux itself. Which I think made for the perfect setting for my plot—a sort of generic Europe, and an easy place in which to disappear. Not to mention an easy place to have a secret bank account, which also plays a crucial role in the plot. In fact, these aspects of Luxembourg are what created the plot itself: I could only have written The Expats having been one in Luxembourg.

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