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A Moth to a Flame
  • Published: 5 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241400739
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

A Moth to a Flame

Formats & editions
EBook
5 Sept 2019
Paperback
5 Sept 2019
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A tense and troubling tale of forbidden love in 1940s Stockholm by one of Sweden's greatest writers, introduced by Siri Hustvedt

In 1940s Stockholm, a young man named Bengt falls into deep, private turmoil with the unexpected death of his mother. As he struggles to cope with her loss, his despair slowly transforms to rage when he discovers that his father had a mistress. Bengt swears revenge on behalf of his mother's memory, but he soon finds himself drawn into a fevered and forbidden affair with the very woman he set out to destroy . . .

Written in a taut, restrained style, A Moth to a Flame is an intense exploration of heartache and fury, desperation and illicit passion. Set against a backdrop of the moody streets of Stockholm and the Hitchcockian shadows in the woods and waters of Sweden's remote islands, this is a psychological masterpiece by one of Sweden's greatest writers.
  • Published: 5 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241400739
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

Praise for A Moth to a Flame

Dagerman wrote with beautiful objectivity. Instead of emotive phrases, he uses a choice of facts, like bricks, to construct an emotion

Graham Greene

A writer of uncommon urgency and power

Siri Hustvedt

Dagerman can evoke such emotion in a single sentence

Colm Toibin

There are some writers (Kafka and Lorca immediately spring to mind) who come to enjoy the status of saint; their lives and deaths constitute statements about existence and its proper priorities. A saint of this type is the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman.

Times Literary Supplement

A literary giant in Sweden, Dagerman conjures a Strindbergian atmosphere of shadowy menace in his brief, intense novel, A Moth to a Flame... The novel absorbs the reader effortlessly... The landscape round Stockholm, with its fog-bound flatlands and grey winter seas, is vividly evoked. This moody, death-haunted novel is well worth reading

Evening Standard

This searing tale of bereavement and loathing feels all too relevant today

Guardian
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