A Happy Little Island
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A Happy Little Island
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Summary
Lars Sund's prescient novel is the story of a remote community caught up in a human tragedy on a vast scale - asylum-seekers drowning at sea. Initially they react with humanity, but as more dead bodies wash up on their shores and disturb their safe lives, many in the community find it increasingly difficult to maintain their air of civility.
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A Happy Little Island by Lars Sund
In the beginning the page was blank and without form, and the scribe sat in front of it, a world forming inside his head. The world grew large, spilling out of him and on to the page. The scribe shaped the world into an island. He named it Fagero, and populated it with an assortment of likely and plausibly unlikely characters, and saw that it was good for his purposes.The people of Fagero were often divided against each other but united in their appreciation of their happy little island. Then the dead bodies began to arrive: hordes of them, washing ashore with no identification and no one to claim them.The island was changing, and the small-town quirkiness becoming less restrained. And the bodies kept arriving, 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. This was prescient at the time of writing and is sadly relevant in 2016, the year of this English translation.A Happy Little Island is an elaborate tale told with style and intelligence.The number and variety of Sund's Dramatis Personae make Fagero the perfect stage for an encounter between common humanity and the insularity and fear of change that affect all cultures.
"In A Happy Little Island, Sund entertains readers in the manner we now expect of himHe achieves this through his ability to invent and exaggerate, with a narrative force to match oral storytelling. He relies on his skilled use of language and his high spirits, humour and serious intent ... and also his empathy with the beliefs his characters hold." - Lyskamsken.net; "Despite all the tall tales, black humour and eccentric characters portrayed with gusto, the small society Lars Sund describes with his unfailing sense for language and visual description is wholly credible. The individual characters have their own way of expressing themselves, and the reader can really hear them. Every episode is visualised in the reader's head like a scene from a film." - Hufvudstadsbladet
Born in 1953, Lars Sund is a Finnish writer from the Swedish-speaking coastal town of Jakobstad, and his eight novels have all been written in Swedish. His last five novels have been translated into Finnish, and A Happy Little Island (En lycklig liten o, 2007) is his first book to be translated into English. Claes Olsson made a film called Colorado Avenue, based on Sund's books Colorado Avenue and Lanthandlerskans son. Colorado Avenue won two prestigious prizes for Finnish literary fiction: the Runeberg in 1992 and the Kiitos kirjasta-mitali (Thanks-for-the-Book Award) in 1993. Lanthandlerskans son took the Lars Widding Award in 1998, while Sund was nominated for the Finlandia Prize in 1997. Lars Sund, who studied English, Swedish and comparative literature at the Abo Akademi, the only exclusively Swedish-language university in Finland, now resides in Uppsala, Sweden.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781908251657 |
| ISBN 10 | 1908251654 |
| Title | A Happy Little Island |
| Author | Lars Sund |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Vagabond Voices |
| Year published | 2016-04-20 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |