A Moth to a Flame
  • Published: 5 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241400746
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
Categories:

A Moth to a Flame

Formats & editions
EBook
5 Sep 2019
Paperback
5 Sep 2019
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A spellbinding tale of forbidden love, set in 1940s Stockholm, by one of Sweden's greatest writers

In a working-class neighbourhood 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 Burnt Child 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: 9780241400746
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224
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