Döda trakten/Kvinnor i revolt

Döda trakten/Kvinnor i revolt Nowhere Land/ Women in Revolt

Alice, 18, comes from the countryside. She moves in with her father Max, a photographer, and his new family in the suburbs. The family consists of stepmother Siri, a radiant feminist building a career within the UN, and two half-brothers: Michael, a peer to Alice, and the idolized, broken “Prince” – two years younger, set to play the lead in the Free Amateur Theatre’s production of Hamlet, staged in an abandoned, occupied industrial hall nearby.

Alice takes the bus into the city and starts building herself a life. The Evening School, the Free University, the Film Archive, Veronica Seger’s apartment where legendary parties are held, the streets of the city – all of this is about to become hers. And the people: Veronica, who teaches her to write like a little animal; Pelle, who becomes her boyfriend; and Evelyn, a rejected poet and dancer in a performance group.

It is 1976/77. “The Ice Age,” says Siri, who remembers another time, full of struggle and political conviction. A time that would later be referred to as “the most peaceful postwar years.”

That’s a lie: in Germany, a war is being fought against a self-proclaimed urban guerrilla movement, sending ripples throughout the entire continent. Violence creeps in, fear eats its way through – paint the town dread paint the town dread – and the dollhouse existence crumbles in the most brutal way imaginable. Nowhere Land/Women in Revolt is the first part of a trilogy. It is about being so young that life is a horizon of possibilities and resistance, about what it takes to become an artist, and what stories one tells when nothing has yet happened.

Reviews

  • Nowhere Land/Women in Revolt is an immersive, lyrical stream of thought—and for a young reader, potentially life-changing. /…/ Here unfolds a story that can best be described as a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale containing all the ingredients one expects from the genre: fraught family dynamics and crumbling façades, childhood friendships that fall apart and new ones that form. /…/ The novel’s language is, in Fagerholm’s style, a lyrical current where past, present, and some kind of now intermingle and shift back and forth. The narrator veers off on tangents, jumps back in time, and restrains herself when she gets ahead of the events. /…/ What constantly recurs, the thread that stitches the stories together in the lyrical, multi-layered whole that Nowhere Land/Women in Revolt is, is resistance. Revolt. /…/ I can imagine that this novel, in the hands of an eighteen-year-old in the midst of breaking free from childhood and stepping into adulthood, could be as life-changing as Doris Lessing was for the thirty-year-old Siri. ”

    Yle, Finland

Author
Photo: Thron Ullberg Monika Fagerholm
Published
2025
Genre
  • Literary
Pages
384
Reading material

Swedish edition

English sample

Rights sold

Finland, Teos (Finnish)

Finland, Förlaget (Swedish)

Sweden, Albert Bonniers

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