Hunter in Huskvarna

"Stridsberg has perfected a kind of contemporary fairy tale with a bracing Scandinavian edge, here elegantly translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner" Christian House, Financial Times

A young woman becomes obsessed with her psychoanalysts daughter. A police officers mistress clandestinely cares for his dying wife. A boy goes missing from the Swedish town of Huskvarna after he was last seen walking with a wolf. From the inside of a dead whales belly, to an industrial town emptied out after its factorys closure, to a Texan prison where a young man visits his sisters murderer on death row, Stridsberg approaches both the strange and the mundane with a fairy-tale sensibility that lights our world anew.

Time runs through this collection like water, variously ebbing, flowing and rippling beneath the shimmering surface of Stridsbergs prose. These genre-spanning stories are held together by a sense of longing: for escape from the narrow margins of a prescribed life, for a past which promises an undiscovered future, for a place or a person that feels like home.

Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner