A magical book about love and death and the slender, enduring line that connects the two.
A brother and sister’s incestuous relationship becomes something even stranger in this novel set in Viking times.
Folkví and Áslakr were born into a prominent family in an isolated coastal village sometime during the great Viking era of trade and exploration. Folkví trains with her mother to become the area’s völva, a kind of seer responsible for acting as a mediator between the world of men and that of the gods. Meanwhile, Áslakr is thought to be one of “the most promising of all the children in the headman’s yard,” sure to become an important member of the expedition crews who travel far down the coast in search of new trading ports. But when the siblings’ parents both die suddenly after a brief illness, Folkví and Áslakr are forced to navigate their adult roles before they are fully prepared, including their first sexual experimentations, which they undertake with each other. With Áslakr gone for the winter months on his first expedition, Folkví begins a relationship with the darkly magnetic Od, a stranger from outside the village, but when Áslakr returns betrothed, all the formidable force of Folkví’s concentration turns to her obsessive quest to keep her brother for herself. The book is narrated from both siblings’ perspectives—Folkví’s section set in the summer of her brother’s betrothal and Áslakr narrating from many years later as he looks back on the life that followed his marriage. While there is a marked difference between the ways they interpret the world, the constant thread of delight in the natural world’s magic and awe in the face of its total domination of mortal lives weaves through every sentence of the sublimely described setting. This is so well achieved that the slender chapter bridging the period that passes between the siblings’ stories—told from the perspective of Urd, one of the three Norn sisters who weave the threads of human lives from their land beyond mortal time—serves to underscore the reality of their mystic lives rather than excuse or explain the novel’s forays into mythological fantasy.
A magical book about love and death and the slender, enduring line that connects the two.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593542606
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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