The Antarctica of Love

"I stared out through the streaming window of the car at the rain falling from the sky, I saw the trees stooping over the road. It was June, it was the month for disappearing, the month for being found in bits, the month for losing your head, your tongue and your genitals. Solveig's gaze followed me wherever I went and each time I closed my eyes I looked into hers, completely still and clear, watching me from eternity. We drove through a tunnel of rain and flowers and trees and the world now was this one place, this single chamber, a grave and a coffin, a wall of trees that all would soon be dead. But first I had to die."

She has been in the world for a brief moment, a world with needs, demands and fears. Until someone decided to snuff out her life and strew the landscape with her body parts. But there are still the children, who were hers once, Valle and Solveig, taken into the care of the authorities and placed somewhere along the length of Sweden. And there are still her parents, Raksha and Ivan, roaming through Stockholm in their departed daughter's former world. And there is still the moment of death, which will never end, ever.

Because this is what happens. The first time she dies is in the forest, when her heart stops at his hands, the second time she dies is when all that is left of her is lowered into the ground, the third time will be when someone says her name for the last time on earth. She is waiting for that to happen. And as much as she wishes the voices still prattling on about her savage earthly fate would hush, she wishes one of her children would say "mum" and mean her.

Sara Stridsberg's new novel is about absolute vulnerability; about brutality, isolation and a mother's love. About what is left when everything else has gone. Antarctica of Love is a heartrending existential drama in which the characteristic blend of Stridsberg's great literary weight and her readability creates an original mix of terror and beauty, longing and black despair. A devastating story of unexpected love, tenderness and light in the total darkness.

About the author

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.Deborah-Bragan Turner is a translator of Swedish literature, and a former bookseller and academic librarian. She studied Scandinavian Languages at University College, London, and her translations include works by Per Olov Enquist and Sara Stridsberg.

Summary

"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

Additional text

Stridsberg's language bears the unbearable, and provides a soft blanket that leads us into the worst - and beyond

Product details

• Authors: Sara Stridsberg, Stridsberg Sara
• Assisted by: Deborah Bragan-Turner (Translation), Bragan-Turner Deborah (Translation)
• Publisher: Quercus Publishing
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.09.2021
• EAN: 9781529415889
• ISBN: 978-1-5294-1588-9
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 134 mm x 214 mm x 24 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION / General, FICTION / City Life, Fiction in translation, Modern and contemporary fiction, FICTION / Feminist