Swanfolk
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'Magical and disturbing' Adam Thirlwell
An astonishing, mind-bending novel about a woman discovering a community of swan-people from one of Iceland's greatest writers.
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE ICELANDIC WOMEN'S LITERATURE PRIZE*
In the not-too-distant future, a young spy named Elísabet Eva is about to discover something that will upend her life.
Elísabet likes to take long solitary walks near the lake. One day, she sees two creatures emerging from the water, half-human, half-swan. She follows them through tangles of thickets into a strange new reality.
Pulled into the monomaniacal, and often violent, quest of the swanfolk, Elísabet finds her own mind increasingly untrustworthy. Soon, she is forced to reckon with the consequences of her involvement with these unusual beings, and a past life she has been trying to evade.
'Ómarsdottir's skills as a poet and playwright are evident' Helen Oyeyemi, New York Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ómarsdóttir (Children in Reindeer Woods) returns with an offbeat and uneven tale of secret committees and hybrid creatures. Narrator Elísabet Eva is a special agent for an unnamed country's Ministry of the Interior. After she is attacked while on a mission in Paris, she's assigned to report on the local stand-up comedy scene, and while visiting a park, she meets a handful of half-human, half-swan animals who periodically whisk her into their world. The "swanfolk," as Elísabet calls them, are sometimes friendly, sometimes violent, and they long to live alongside humans. One day, a parcel arrives at the Ministry containing a swanfolk's unhatched egg, which prompts Elísabet to report the swanfolk's existence to her office. An investigation is launched, but no traces of the swanfolk are found, and despite the egg, Elísabet wonders if she imagined everything. Throughout, Ómarsdóttir hints at Elísabet's unreliability, from the character conjuring an imaginary sister and pet dog to an occasional use of third-person narration. And while the author cleverly employs the swanfolk to explore Elísabet's mental state, the story basically amounts to a series of odd details. The whole doesn't quite live up to its parts.