THE SHADOW SONATA
by Tiina Laitila Kälvemark
Valon ja pimeän sonaatit, WSOY 2023, 352pp
A magnetic and suspenseful novel about a crime that gives rise to an unlikely friendship by an acclaimed literary voice
In the summer of 1993, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, Mikael Helenius, is kidnapped. Ten months later he is found alive, an empty bottle containing an adder under his arm. The media goes into a frenzy over the so-called ‘Snake Boy’ case, but Mikael has lost the ability to talk, instead parsing his thoughts and emotions through playing piano while the details of his abduction remain a question mark, like the clef-like coils of a snake.
Twenty-five years later, journalist Saara Martel leaves Paris and returns to her small Ostrobothnian hometown of Teerimäki to lick her wounds after a fall from professional grace and the collapse of her marriage. It is not so much her return to the parish that sparks the locals’ curiosity as that of a shadowy figure, a man calling himself Mikko Brander with a snake tattoo around his neck in whom Saara recognises someone from long ago. Mikael has returned, but why? Saara is determined to find out and she must face the memory of a fateful choice she made many years ago.
Moving in the structure of a sonata, from allegro to rondo, Laitila Kälvemark’s elegant prose builds a propulsive, beautiful story about a crime with far-reaching consequences, the power of music, and a rare friendship, bringing to mind Linda Olsson’s Astrid & Veronika, Stina Jackson’s The Silver Road, and Kerstin Ekman’s Blackwater.
RIGHTS SOLD: Finland WSOY (orig.)
Materials available: Long English sample and synopsis, Finnish edition
Praise:
“A heartbreakingly beautiful novel about the power of friendship and music”
“Tiina Laitila Kälvemark’s fifth work of fiction is described on the back cover as beautiful. I have to agree with this. Unusually for contemporary novels, Laitila Kälvemark’s work deals with the big serious questions of life and does so with candour (...). The imagery is sometimes very dark, but hope and tenderness shine through like light. The book, as its title suggests, is effectively built on extremes and contrasts.”
“The reader will find themselves in a suspense as to how the novel ends […] A pleasing reading experience”
is a Stockholm-based Finnish journalist and author.
Her debut novel, Of Stones and Silence (WSOY, 2015) was published to critical acclaim and shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2015. Her subsequent works have been nominated for numerous literary awards, including the Toisinkoinen, Runeberg, Tulenkantaja, and Bothnia Prizes in Finland. Laitila Kälvemark’s elegant and controlled prose often deals with themes of dislocation, marginalisation, and the unpredictability of the human mind.
The Shadow Sonata is her fourth novel.
