Swedish writer Ekman, author of 17 novels, debuts in English with
this prizewinning thriller: a literary crime story for readers who
thought Peter H eg's Smilla's Sense of Snow was too upbeat.
Arriving at the Swedish commune Starhill to join her lover Dan
Ulander, Annie Raft stumbles on two corpses lying in a tent and
sees a boy running from the scene. Eighteen years later, she and
her daughter, Mia, see the boy, now grown to manhood. Before Annie
can tell the authorities that she's recognized their only lead in
the unsolved case, Mia is killed. But alert readers will long since
have surmised that the boy she saw was Johan Brandberg, who fled
his miserable family after escaping from the well his resentful
stepbrothers had lowered him into. Taking with him an eel he
rescued from the well, Johan had hitchhiked with an older woman
calling herself Ylja across the border to Norway, where the woman
briskly relieved him of his virginity, established him as the
latest incarnation of the mystical Traveler who was prophesied to
arrive with a live animal, and finally drove him away. The frenzy
of isolation to which Ylja pushes Johan is mirrored by Annie's own
alienation back in Starhill, where the hatred of Swedes for Lapps
and commune members for the bourgeois who surround them - not to
mention the rivalries within the commune - finally reaches toxic
proportions. In an Arctic landscape whose grim determinism recalls
Hardy, commune families grow, harden into deformity, or split up
with chill fatalism, and readers impatient with Ekman's brooding
vignettes of calcifying loneliness are likely to feel like polar
explorers trudging along under heavy loads in the worst weather,
hoping to find, in the aftermath of Johan's return, the key that
will redeem their ordeal in a burst of wild insight. Not for the
impatient or fainthearted: a dour study of murder as the logical
outgrowth of simmering, all-consuming rage. (Kirkus Reviews)
Midsummer eve, 1974, in the far north of Sweden. Annie Raft arrives with her six-year-old daughter in a small town called Blackwater to join her lover Dan on a commune. But Dan is not there to meet them. Panicking, Annie treks into the wilderness to find the commune, in the strange, hovering light of midsummer night. By the river, she finds a tent;and inside it two bodies hideously murdered - stabbed so violently that the feathers from their sleeping bag scatter the ground. Many years later, Annie has settled in the region, and Mia, her daughter has grown up. Early one morning glimpses Mia in the arms of the man she believes responsible for the murders. The seemingly inexplicable crime, long buried, is forced to come to its own dark and unexpected conclusion.
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