Juhani teaches Finnish and literature in a high school. He has just divorced from his wife Hanna, when a new student enrolls in the school. Marianne is young, beautiful, clever – and 17.

They start talking about books and movies, just like a teacher and his pet might. When Marianne shows him her short stories, they start meeting up outside of school hours. Juhani realizes soon that there is something more serious between them.

The novel is a beautiful and surprising story about falling in love. It is full of intertextuality and of course refers in a clever and self-aware way to Nabokov, too, but takes unexpected turns. It is a psychologically sharp book for book lovers.

A sweeping, multilayered story of family conflicts, the ethics of science and the search for identity in an impersonal society.

When professor Joe Chayefski’s neuroscience lab in Baltimore is attacked by animal rights activists, he doesn’t connect the dots at first. But when he receives a phone call from Alina, his Finnish ex-wife, he begins to gradually realize that the threats on his career and new family are connected to Samuel, the son he left behind in Finland two decades ago. Joe soon learns that his son’s life has gone badly astray, and that Samuel has devoted himself to extreme animal rights activism. Samuel is now somewhere in the United States, but neither Alina nor the authorities know his exact location. Joe realizes that he has to take action to protect his wife and two daughters from his estranged son, by any means necessary.

By depicting its three main characters in an intense struggle to understand an increasingly confusing world, They Know Not What They Do offers readers both piercing psychological acumen and a striking dystopian satire of a neuro-digitalized Western society in which nothing is private and everything is for sale.

RIGHTS SOLD

FINLAND, Tammi (Original publisher)
CHINA, China International Radio Press
CZECH REPUBLIC, LEDA
FRANCE, Fayard
GERMANY, Piper
HUNGARY, Cser
LITHUANIA, Alma Littera
NETHERLANDS, Signatuur/A.W. Bruna
POLAND, Foksal
VIETNAM, Chibooks
WORLD ENGLISH, Oneworld