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  • Published: 6 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9781646221721
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

Antiquity

A Novel





Elegant, slippery, and provocative, Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish author Hanna Johansson—a story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo

On a Greek island rich with ancient beauty, a lonely woman in her thirties upends the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. Lust and admiration for Helena, a chic older artist, brings Antiquity’s unnamed narrator to Ermoupoli, where Helena’s daughter, Olga, seems at first like an obstacle and a nuisance. But the unpredictable forces of ego and desire take over, leading our narrator down a more dangerous path, and causing the roles of lover and beloved, child and adult, stranger and intimate to become distorted. As the months go by, the fragile web connecting the three women nears rupture, and the ominous consequences of their entanglement loom just beyond a summer that must end.

With echoes of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, but wholly original and contemporary, Antiquity probes the depths of memory, beauty, morality, and the narratives that arrange our experience of the world.

  • Published: 6 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9781646221721
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

About the author

Hanna Johansson

Hanna Johansson began her writing career as a critic and essayist covering topics like fashion, literature, art and performance, and currently works as the art editor at the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Her debut novel, Antiquity, was awarded the Katapultpriset prize in 2021.

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