NOCTURNAL LIFELINES
by Siiri Enoranta
Keuhkopuiden uni, Gummerus, 2024, 288pp
Winner of the Stargazer award! The Best Finnish Science Fiction title of 2024!
Nominated for the Torch-Bearer Literary Export Prize of 2024
Hungarian rights sold!
Winged human-like creatures Homo arboris live in symbiosis, each with their own designated lung-trees. At nightfall, they must return to their tree and attach themselves to the tree trunk with their wings or they will perish. Only their atrophied wings remind them of their ancestor’s ability to fly into the skies.
Katica, a playful and fiercely independent young woman knows how to get what she wants. She has charmed the aristocratic circles in which she moves with ease, engaging in romantic encounters and casual sex whenever she feels like it, until she falls genuinely in love after meeting Sera, an enchanting patron of the arts. After clashing with Doctor Marquis Berenice Lucretius, the wealthiest and the most pompous aristocrat, Katica cannot connect to her lung tree anymore. She cannot feel the flow of the groundwater or hear the mushroom grow. Her world is empty and hollow. A cycle of revenge begins, and the world will never be the same again.
Nocturnal Lifelines is a mesmerizing literary fantasy with romantic, baroque and decadent imagery. It is an intelligent allegory that goes beyond its surreal premise into unexpected depths. Dark events are tinged with black humour, examining the fascination of the protagonist and her community with superficial pleasures, hedonistic gratification and the compulsion to maintain a facade. It explores our alienation from nature and themes of power, violence, manipulation, revenge and love. The text plays with various kinds of illusions on both a concrete and symbolic level.
RIGHTS SOLD: Finland: Gummerus (orig.), Hungary: Polar
Materials available: Finnish edition, English sample and synopsis
Praise for NOCTURNAL LIFELINES:
“This first-class work captivates the reader regardless of time and place, prompting the reader to reflect on their own choices and the consequences of those choices. Alongside the theme of nature, human emotions such as love, jealousy, selfishness and the desire for power are universal.”
“...an excellent novel about human-like creatures that tickle one’s imagination. – – Charming and moving as a whole. – – The characters in the novel are skillfully constructed, and the protagonists, in particular, are multi-dimensional and full of human contradictions.”
“Nocturnal Lifelines is… a stunning revenge novel. – Enoranta knows how to open up the structure of the spiral of the revenge and how to describe its violence, for both the perpetrator and the opponent in every possible way.”
“The masterful way in which Enoranta describes the explosiveness smouldering beneath the surface and the impulses and unpredictability that initiate change and lead to a new period of development is the best thing about Nocturnal Lifelines.”
is an award-winning YA and fiction author. She’s one of Finland’s contemporary literary torchbearers. In her stories she created wonderful fantasy worlds, which include strong and complicated female leads. Within the YA and crossover fiction genre, she is known for her skillful depiction of relationships and sexual awakenings. Enoranta’s writing has been described as “earth-shatteringly good”, “linguistically beautiful”, “dazzling”, “stylish” and “enigmatic”.
Enoranta’s 2018 title The Burning Dark (Tuhatkuolevan kirous, WSOY, 2018) won the prestigious Finlandia Prize for Best Children’s/YA title of the Year.
Her latest adult fiction title Nocturnal Lifelines (Gummerus 2024) is nominated for the best Science Fiction Novel of 2024 and Torch-Bearer Literary Export Award 2024.
