We are very happy to include two new literary fiction titles to our Fall 2023 Catalogue!

Firstly, we have added to our list 36 URNS: A History of Being Wrong, the latest title by award-winning author Sirpa Kähkönen! Her moving and poetic requiem to her mother was published in Finland by Siltala in August 2023.

Critics have already hailed 36 URNS as Sirpa’s best novel yet:

“Sirpa Kähkönen’s previous historical novels and non-fiction works are great, personal, and attractive, but now she has done something completely new and wonderful. Kähkönen writes more maturely and boldly than ever before. [—] 36 URNS, if any at all, is a mature novel. It has a rich taste. It is like the crown on a long career as a writer. [—] 36 URNS is a literary experience. Its language rings, jingles, reports, lyricizes, sympathizes with the pain, and carries the history of a family with it.”
– Outi Hytönen, Suomen Kuvalehti magazine

36 URNS has already had its first foreign deal, as Sirpa’s Estonian publisher Koolibri has acquired the Estonian rights for this title.

“Sirpa Kähkönen’s masterpiece poetically brings together complex family relationships and the twists and turns of the history of Finland.”
– Kadri Rahusaar, managing editor, Koolibri, Estonia

Download materials for 36 URNS here!

Secondly, we are proud to add to our list FIRSTBORN, the latest title by award-winning author Maria Peura! Her heartrending story about her firstborn son being taken into custody was published in Finland by Otava in August 2023 – and has also received excellent reviews!

Praise for FIRSTBORN:

“FIRSTBORN is a heartrending and elegantly built story. It talks about a mother who has experienced belittling as a child and domestic violence and who now has to relinquish her child into child protection institution. [—] A mother’s love is the core theme of the novel. It is depicted in many forms, in different stages of life and in different directions [—]. It is a personal and intimate novel. In its subject matter, it is a profound and skillful novel. [—] Peura impressively depicts the magnitude and the personal, tearing impact of the events [described in the book].”

– Outi Hytönen, Suomen Kuvalehti magazine

Download materials for FIRSTBORN here!

36 Urns: A History of Being Wrong

Sirpa Kähkönen

A celebrated author’s masterful and poetic confession of love to her mother

Author Sirpa Kähkönen’s mother Riitta (b. 1941) died in March 2022 after a long illness. In life, she struggled to accept love. “I do not grieve your death, I grieve your life,” Sirpa Kähkönen writes, knowing fully well that her mother wouldn’t like the phrase. Her mother rejected love, despite longing for it the most. Riitta was athletic, beautiful, and gifted. A traffic accident at the age of 16 changed the course of her life for ever.

Drawing on her mother’s diaries, Kähkönen depicts the life of a 1950s girl and the dramatic change that followed the accident. The novel talks about community dance halls, a broken mind, flowing hems, a 1960s mother, anxiety, anger and hate, addiction, and moments of psychosis. It talks about how wars and other crises become corporeal, how violence is inherited, and how the culture of discouragement and submission is passed down through the generations in sayings and attitudes, with the author clearly seeing herself as part of the tradition of anger and violence.

The novel is permeated by a fiery love, as if an ancient Finnish spell that, with the power of words, is capable of bringing loved ones back from the dead.

Firstborn

Maria Peura

A heartrending autobiographical novel about one’s own child being placed in an institution and about feeling out of place as a child

The author starts putting together the story of her firstborn child – a child whose ill-being and problematic behavior eventually led to him being placed in a child protection institution. Only now, when everything is okay, does the author dare to put her own distress and guilt into words. “What mistakes did I make? How was I trespassed against and why has my child ended up broken because of me being broken?”

Maria Peura’s autobiographical novel is a relentlessly honest and lyrically beautiful depiction of the cycles of trauma, of the effects of violence, and the chance for light and survival.