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Author: Stridsberg, Sara, Bragan-Turner, Deborah

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 18 January 2024 by Quercus Publishing (MacLehose Press) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 288 pages
128 x 198 x 20 | 194g

‘Stridsberg has perfected a kind of contemporary fairy tale with a bracing Scandinavian edge, here elegantly translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner’ Christian House, Financial TimesA young woman becomes obsessed with her psychoanalyst’s daughter. A police officer’s mistress clandestinely cares for his dying wife. A boy goes missing from the Swedish town of Huskvarna after he was last seen walking with a wolf. From the inside of a dead whale’s belly, to an industrial town emptied out after its factory’s closure, to a Texan prison where a young man visits his sister’s murderer on death row, Stridsberg approaches both the strange and the mundane with a fairy-tale sensibility that lights our world anew.

Time runs through this collection like water, variously ebbing, flowing and rippling beneath the shimmering surface of Stridsberg’s prose. These genre-spanning stories are held together by a sense of longing: for escape from the narrow margins of a prescribed life, for a past which promises an undiscovered future, for a place or a person that feels like home. Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner