With stunning subtlety and precision, these eleven stories embrace contradiction and transport us to in-between realms: between tenderness and violence, between the dreamlike and the excruciatingly real, between childlike wonder and ancient wisdom.
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