A Happy Little Island

An elaborate tale told with style and intelligence. Sund's writing is the perfect stage for an encounter between common humanity and the insularity and fear of change that affect all cultures. In the beginning, the scribe sat in front a blank page, a world forming inside his head. The world spilled onto the page and the scribe shaped the world into an island. He named it Fagero, populated it with an assortment of likely and plausibly unlikely characters, and saw that it was good for his purposes. Then the dead bodies began to arrive. The island was changing, and the small-town quirkiness becoming less restrained, forcing Fagero's inhabitants to confront the unhappy truth that, even on their remote island, the world's horrors and injustices could not be ignored. Translated from Swedish by Peter Graves.