Author(s): Sara Stridsberg

Short Stories | Translated fiction | Sweden

"Stridsberg has perfected a kind of contemporary fairy tale with a bracing Scandinavian edge, here elegantly translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner" - Christian House, Financial Times

A 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

Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner

Review: There's a dreamy quality to these death-stalked tales from Swedish author Stridsberg, which marry old-world mysteriousness to modern sensibilities * Daily Mail *
Stridsberg has perfected a kind of contemporary fairy tale with a bracing Scandinavian edge, here elegantly translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner...This is storytelling with an eye for the uncanny -- Christian House * Financial Times *

Author Biography: Sara Stridsberg, born in 1972, is a writer, playwright and former member of the Swedish Academy. Her first novel, Happy Sally, was published in 2004, and her break-through came two years later with the publication of The Faculty of Dreams, her second novel, the English translation of which was longlisted for the Booker International Prize in 2019. Her novels have been translated into 25 languages, and she has been shortlisted for the prestigious August Prize three times, including in 2012 for her collection of plays, Medealand and Other Plays. She lives in Stockholm.