Shortlisted for the 2018 petrona award for Crime Fiction
A celebrated bestseller in Sweden, and the winner of the prestigious Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize, The White City is a novel “with a vulnerability that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” (Expressen) about a criminal’s girlfriend left alone to pick up the pieces of her imploding existence.
Karolina Ramqvist is one of the most influential writers and feminists of her generation in Sweden. She had her breakthrough in 2009 with the critically acclaimed book The Girlfriend and in 2015 she was awarded the prestigious P.O. Enquist Literary Prize for her latest novel The White City.
Read an extract at Guernica and the January 2017 edition of Europe Now Journal. My translation of an extract from It Is the Night, Ramqvist’s long essay on what it means to be a writer, was featured on LitHub. My essay on translating the novel was published by the Paris Review Daily.
Unusual intimate perspective on organized crime
Joyce Carol Oates via Twitter
This short novel, full of suspense and beautifully written dreamlike sequences, places readers directly in Karin’s situation and allows them to feel her isolation and desperation.
Publishers Weekly
Though the plot of Ramqvist’s English debut may make it sound like a crime thriller, the pace is lulling, the writing sensuous and patiently observed. So much of the book, in fact, consists of long scenes of Karin nursing Dream or spending hours watching the infant play that the book feels, more than any thriller, like an allegory of parenting. Delicate and unsparing.
Kirkus Reviews