New Swedish Books. Autumn 2016 1
NEW SWEDISH BOOKS Adrift! Existence is ambiguous.
The nature of time and the flight of thought and dreams provide constant succour to storytelling. Since her debut novel Camera in 2001, Eva-Marie Liffner has shown how we live with the ambiguity of existence. She is respected for her highly refined stories and exciting intrigues, and she has a way with language that demonstrates her control over complex narratives. Her novel Adrift! operates across several points in time, uniting fates and events across a century. We move through an English soldier’s troubled memories of the First World War, we meet the young Brontë sisters on the Yorkshire moors. An enjoyable tale, in which fantasies, dreams, dramatic fates and strong emotions blow playfully yet seriously through time and people. Eva-Marie Liffner ADRIFT! Natur & Kultur Rights: Salomonsson Agency I Am Hill The Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill is a fascinating person. His landscape paintings of France in the 1870s, his paintings from his illness, they all grip the viewer with their expressiveness and the immediate connections between inner and outer life. After his breakdown in Paris, he was deemed incapable of taking care of himself. After spending time in a mental hospital, he was cared for over the rest of his life in his home in Lund, southern Sweden. His paintings, full of his pain, tell a gripping tale of a vulnerability that his era never truly understood. In the poet and prose author Kristofer Flensmarck’s novel I Am Hill, Hill steps into the limelight, highly-strung, self-aware and brittle, he has an artist’s calling. He paints obsessively, seeks true expression. Flensmarck’s novel captures an essential part of artistic endeavour: being one with your art. Kristofer Flensmarck I AM HILL Natur & Kultur Rights: Natur & Kultur 20