‘When someone leaves, existence splits into a before and an after.’ Lydia Sandgren’s epic, multigenerational saga explores both these existences within the Berg family in a novel that won Sweden’s August Prize in 2020 before going on to sell more than 100,000 copies in Sweden alone.
Rakel Berg is only 11 when her mother, the historian and translator Cecilia Berg, disappears without trace, leaving her publisher father Martin to bring up her and her brother Elis in a Gothenberg suburb. Fast-forward 15 years, and Martin is still living alone, visited by his children and haunted by Cecilia’s ghost. Despite the success of the publishing company begun with his teenage buddy Andrén, he sifts the wreckage of his own attempts at literature –‘the beginnings of short stories, essays, novel synopses and several attempts at plays’. Martin’s meditation sends us back to his years as a painfully earnest philosophy undergraduate, wooing Cecilia with his patchy understanding of Wittgenstein and carousing with his artist friend Gustav Becker.
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