A shocking yet bright work about a harsh subject.

Your Love Is Infinite tells about 6-year-old Saara, who has been taken to her grandparents’ house for the summer because her parents aren’t able to care for her. Grandpa is the only adult Saara believes loves her, but it is precisely his violent love that drives Saara into a world of fantasy and guilt. Saara longs for her mother, but she isn’t able to help, and Saara is left to her grandfather’s mercy.

Without blaming anyone, Peura weaves a taut, beautiful, powerful tale about a difficult subject: incest. She writes about children’s trust and dependence, and how they manage to survive.

Shortlisted for the Finlandia Prize in 2001

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SPAIN, Sexto Piso

Maria Peura’s third novel Under the Water is a powerful story of a girl who grows up with her parents on an isolated island in Finnish Lapland.

When she moves to a university town to study German language and literature, she is unable to adapt to her new surroundings, with even escalators provoking fear and wonder in her. The girl doesn’t know her limits at all, nor does she know how to behave. She is an untamed child of nature in the wrong environment. The girl nevertheless manages to find some friends among the immigrant community. Peura’s sprawling novel is overflowing with sea winds, the storms of inner life, and the powerful presence of nature.

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GERMANY, Saxa

At the Edge of Light is a suffocating story of a true-life Romeo and a Juliet born somewhere in the far north, in a world of permafrost and insufferable people.

The novel is set in a close village community and tells the story of a girl and the boy she loves. Burning passion threatens to consume the lovers, and other people are a source of pain, but there is also room for absurd, ad-hoc humour. Peura describes her characters beautifully, heartbreakingly and with great honesty. Readers fear for them, and hope that the passion and curiosity that these young lovers struggle so vainly to conceal will not completely destroy them.

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English (UK)

Having grown up in a northern Finnish town with a predominantly Laestadian population, Anni becomes more familiar with her roots and this sect of Christianity while working on her master’s thesis. Immersing herself into her research is helping her process her recent, painful divorce. Anni is also doing her best to support her 15-year-old daughter Mirka, who has sought refuge in drugs and is spiraling out of control.

When Anni meets an interesting man online and Mirka finds a supportive therapy group, life appears to settle into new routines. Suddenly, however, controlling and cult-like elements begin to surface in Mirka’s therapy, and Anni becomes concerned: the threads of manipulation are both invisible and difficult to break. Meanwhile Anni is re-examining painful buried secrets from her childhood. The lives of both mother and daughter are pushed to the verge. Maria Peura writes potently and honestly about the fragile human mind and the nature of manipulation.