The long-awaited new novel by Finlandia-prize winner! A bold, and brave novel about young woman’s sexuality, the power of narration, and identity.

Natalia starts to see a therapist to help solve the problems in her sex life. It is clear from the beginning that she is not going to play by the rules of the therapy. The weekly sessions combine art, philosophy, literature, childhood memories, and erotic experiences as a method of treatment, and slowly they make Natalia lose all her inhibitions. She starts to enjoy the therapy – maybe too much?

The novel takes a deconstructive approach to the self-help narratives of our time and drives the tools of autofiction into a dead end, asking what is concealed, when everything is revealed.

Rights sold:

FINLAND: Teos (orig.)
BELGIUM: De Bezige Bij
ESTONIA: Rahva Raamat
FRANCE: Gallimard
GERMANY: dtv
HUNGARY: Scolar Kiado
ITALY: Elliot Edizioni
LITHUANIA: BALTO
NETHERLANDS: De Bezige Bij
NORWAY: Oktober
ROMANIA: Humanitas Fiction
SWEDEN: Norstedts
UNITED STATES: W.W. Norton / Liveright

Laura Lindstedt’s impressive novel Scissors succeeds in developing from a description of contemporary adoptive parenthood and motherhood into a discourse on fundamental issues.

Scissors is a story of a woman, Maria, who adopts a little girl from China. Great expectations and the desire to love turn to inadequateness before the child’s blank stare. What happens if a child doesn’t respond at all? Or if the mother and the child are afraid of each other?

Lindstedt writes boldly about a woman’s life and the need to love one’s child. The novel discusses sensitive matters that are not often talked about: the distance between child and parent, the fear of failure and finally a mother’s mental instability.

Scissors manifests both a great command of language and structure and a skillful ability to manipulate plot.

RIGHTS SOLD

DENMARK, Turbine

Seven women meet in a white, undefined space seconds after their deaths. Time, as we understand it, has ceased to exist, and all bodily sensations seem to have disappeared.

None of the women can remember what happened to her, or how she got there. Performance artist Shlomith from New York, chief accountant Polina from Moscow, heart transplant patient Rosa Imaculada from Brazil, upper-class Nina from Marseilles who is expecting twins, Wlbgis from the Netherlands, who suffers from throat cancer, Senegalese Maimuna, who dreams of a career as a model, and Austrian teenager, Ulrike. They don’t know each other. They don’t know why they are there – or where they are. In turn they try to remember, to piece together the fragments of their lives, their identities, their lost loves, and to pinpoint the moment they left their former lives behind.

Lindstedt plays with genres from essay to poetry, transitioning from humour to rage – while asking her reader to contemplate the question of death’s inevitability and what follows it. As also in Lindstedt’s acclaimed debut novel Scissors, Oneiron addresses the challenges of communication on several levels.

Rights sold:

Original publisher: FINLAND, Teos
WORLD ENGLISH, Oneworld
BULGARIA, Faber
CZECH REPUBLIC, Argo
DENMARK, Rosinante & Co.
FRANCE, Gallimard
HUNGARY, Scolar
ITALY, Elliot
LITHUANIA, Versus Aureus
NORWAY, Oktober
POLAND, Poznańskie
ROMANIA, Paralela 45
SWEDEN, Norstedts
SPAIN: Armaenia