“Compassionate and complex” Financial Times
“Stridsberg writes with chilling poise” New York Times
“A haunting portrait of the starkest meanings of love and family. Stridsberg’s literary talent left me awestruck” KATE REED PETTY, author of True Story
**A Financial Times Book of the Year 2021**
They say you die three times.
The first time for me was when my heart stopped beating beneath his hands by the lake.
The second was when what was left of me was lowered into the ground in front of Ivan and Raksha at Bromma Church.
The third will be the last time my name is spoken on earth.
Inni lives her life on the margins, but it is a life that is full and complex, filled with different shades of dark and light… Until she is brutally murdered one summer’s day, on a lake shore at the heart of a distant, rain-washed forest.
On the surface, this is the story of the moment her life is violently extinguished – a moment that will never end, not ever – but it is also about the time before, and about the lives that carry on afterwards. It’s about her children, her parents, her childhood of neglect, her volatile adolescence, and the chain of choices, tragedies and accidents that lead her to a life on the streets and take her into the wrong crowd, the wrong places and, finally, the wrong car with the wrong person.
Sara Stridsberg’s new novel is about absolute vulnerability, brutality and isolation. At times disturbing, this is a devastating story of unexpected love, tenderness and light in the total darkness.
Translated from Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner
