Search Results for: the gravity of love

A dazzlingly inventive and acclaimed novel set in a Stockholm psychiatric hospital – by one of Sweden’s most exciting literary talents

“I’ll put my head in the oven so you know where I am,” he whispers, kissing her neck.

Jim – charming, captivating, much loved by his women friends – has attempted suicide several times. Over his period of incarceration at the Beckomberga hospital for the mentally unstable, he voices his determination to succeed. Some day soon, he tells his daughter – as he has earlier told his mother and his wife – he will swallow sixty tablets, help them down with a bottle of whisky, and swim impossibly far out into the Atlantic.

Will he, really?

This question plagues Jim’s daughter, the narrator of this powerful novel, who is as addicted to the hospital as her father is to alcohol. Through her subtle observations we understand the emotional needs of diehard alcoholics, the rationally uxoricidal, and other seemingly normal inhabitants of a psychiatric unit in the process of shutting down, depriving them of the only place they have known as home.

A Magic Mountain for our times, for readers of Eimear McBride and Alexander Masters.

Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner

“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**

Inside me was voiceless silence, above me only bare defenceless sky and beneath me the earth’s unrelenting gravity, pulling me down

The moment of Inni’s death will never end. Not ever. Murdered one summer’s day on a lake shore at the heart of a distant, rain-washed forest, she tells the story of the moment her life was violently extinguished by an anonymous man.

But amidst that moment of death lies the story of what came before, and of the lives that carry on afterwards. This is the story of her children, her parents 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.

The Antarctica of Love is the unflinching testimony of a woman on the margins, giving voice to the voiceless and offering an insight into depths of absolute vulnerability, brutality and isolation. Hauntingly beautiful yet 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