Stina Jackson

I chose the book entirely because its understated cover seemed to promise a slowly developing, evocative read. And that's what it delivered. Set in under-populated northern Sweden, there is a dual story line. School teacher Lelle has spent the last three years obsessively seeking his daughter, who disappeared from a lonely bus stop early one morning, and of whom no trace has ever been found. His marriage has disintegrated, and he too, friendless and dysfunctional, is falling apart. Seventeen year old Meja and her mother Silje move to the area after Silje meets a local man online. Silje is mentally troubled, and has for years dragged her daughter from place after place as she gets together with a succession of unsuitable men. Meja seems to find a way out from this when she meets a boy and falls in love with him and with his family who live self-sufficiently, having excluded themselves from the modern world. The story as it unfolds perhaps brings few surprises. However, the landscape of dense, dark forest filled with abandoned houses, lakes and secrets encroaches upon everything, and it's this unsettling landscape and its secrets that carries the story forward. It's immersive, slow and the ending isn't particularly surprising. But the power of this novel is in the slowly emerging characters of the main protagonists, and in the depiction of the untamed landscape which they inhabit.… (mere)