New Swedish Books. Autumn 2016 1
NEW SWEDISH BOOKS Ida Andersen THE PUBLIC RIGHT O
F WAY ENDS HERE Bokförlaget Mormor Rights: Bokförlaget Mormor The Public Right of Way Ends Here To be seen as an outsider is to fight an eternal battle, particularly in your teens: battling bullies, teachers, parents and not least yourself. It’s particularly hard in a small community, where life can be suffocating. In The Public Right of Way Ends Here, Ida Andersen tells the story of one year in the mid 1970s. Fifteen-year-old Trine grows up in her father’s collective farm, several miles outside of Växjö in southern Sweden. Her father is an artist from Denmark, with radical ideas about art, communal living and politics. He has a constant stream of new lovers, and Trine pays for it, shut out from society and desperately trying to blend in. Ida Andersen’s novel is a gripping, complex portrait of Trine, lost in life, in a time and an environment that feels at once distant and impossibly close. 10 Photo: Ateljé Brorson