Book description
Isak Lovenstad is a pioneering obstetrician - and a powerful,
charismatic womanizer. Every summer he gathers his three daughters by
different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarsö. Here Erika,
Molly and Laura know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family,
and here, in the society of other children, each undergoes the rites of
growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none is comparable
to Erika's bond with Ragnar, a rebellious misfit whose intensity makes
them inseparable. But when they turn fourteen, and their relationship
threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar's outcast state, she turns away
suddenly - a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless
precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to alter forever
each sister's life. Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarsö to
see their father - now eighty-four and in year-round exile there - the
three women confront, finally, the spectre of that awful summer whose
mark each has since carried. Bold and starkly beautiful, A Blessed Child
is a haunting parable of innocence lost. Praise for Grace:
'Clear-sighted, large-hearted fiction without illusions but never
without pity - or without humour' Independent 'Extraordinarily fearless
. . . moving and convincing . . . This is a work of the most intricate
and impressive artistry'Independent on Sunday
Linn Ullmann is a graduate of New York University, where she studied
English literature. She returned to her native Oslo in 1990, where she
now lives with her husband and children and works as a journalist and
literary critic.
