The Winter Garden (Vinterträdgården)

Christine Falkenland

Christine Falkenland has written a sparkling beautiful and sad novel about passion, poetry and forbidden love. But it is also a story about a woman’s way out, about the conditions of creation, about freedom and captivity, about loneliness and closeness.

 

It is not uncommon, that Cristine Falkenland’s books take place where time somehow has stopped once and for all. But in The Winter Garden it is without doubt the present that is the frame of the story. This time she lets us meet an ordinary preschool teacher, who’s life pretty much stands still, and she has accepted it. Until the day she meets the enormously beautiful Sharzad.

 

“I wanted to write about love in – for me – a new way. When a struck of lightning changes everything. I wanted to write about passion, which is not only for urban life, night life. The painful desire which doesn’t take into consideration who you think you are.”

 

200 pages

 

Rights sold

The Netherlands: Uitgeverij Grote Letter Bibliotheek B.V

Sweden: Wahlström & Widstrand

 

Reviews

”Falkenland has always been a master on carving out descriptive details, and now when she definitely breaks with the undated landscape of time where her books usually take place, she can be even more precise. The prose is just as well written as always, no transports, everything that is told is important.”

Dagens Nyheter

 

”She moves at a crawl, Falkenland, in her true element. Suggestively lyrical, as usual. /…/ Falkenland is Swedish literature’s strongest tragedy dramatists. May she never stop being Falkenland.”

Helsingborgs Dagblad

 

”The Winter Garden is a novel about the difficulties to describe love. This is also where the strength of this book lays: in these very hopelessly grandiose and pretentious attempts to catch what will not be caught.”

Upsala Nya Tidning

 

”The Winter Garden is a beautiful and somewhat melancholic account of a passionate story of an unusual kind.”

Norrköpings Tidningar

 

”The text is pliable, sensual and beautiful, and holds up all the way to be read slowly and with gentle reflection. And this author does not flinch at the clichés found on the roads of life and literature – in her texts “all the reddest, dark red and yellow roses” and all the other phrases found in cheap literature take place as natural as ever. Since she never loses control over her text, these breaches of the rules of literary codes which at first seem somewhat sticky, are rather just natural and relieving.

Hufvudstadsbladet, Finland

 

”The novel’s language is trembling in itself; the story is impatient, pleasurable and wants to move on. The variations between Laura’s work, class and meetings with Shahrzad are constant. At a start it is confusing, but after a while it becomes a pleasant flow to just fall into. Nothing falters in The Winter Garden.”

Arbetarbladet

 

”…the language is soft and solemn at the same time…”

Aftonbladet