The Helios Disaster
*Longlisted for the US National Book Award 2020*
This powerful portrait of mental illness and modern spin on the myth of Athena portrays the mind of a girl in foster care confined to a small Swedish town.
This modern spin on the myth of Athena plunges us deep inside the mind of an unlikely twelve-year-old goddess confined to a small Swedish town. Separated from her father just moments after bursting from his skull in full armour, Anna is packed off into foster care where she learns to ski, speaks in tongues, and negotiates the needs of a quirky cast of relatives. Unable to overcome her father's absence, however, she finally succumbs to depression and is institutionalized. Anna's rallying war cry rings out across the pages of this concise and piercing novel as a passionate appeal for belonging taken to its emotional extreme.
'A moving trip to an emotional bottom…A flinty, lyrical, and storm-clouded study of loss.' — Kirkus Reviews
'Knausgård is an impressive writer.' — Publishers Weekly
'Boström Knausgård's careful exploration of mental illness is restrained and entirely unsentimental. (...) Her prose is unobtrusive in its simplicity and minimalism. The result is both powerful and lyrical.' — Words Without Borders
'Linda Boström Knausgård's The Helios Disaster vibrates with a strange, seductive intensity. A mythological origin story as well as a modern story of otherness, it portrays the push and pull of human connection — the anguish of yearning for, but also fearing, the warmth and reach of others. Knausgård's simple, disarming words bear complex, profound, and surprising truths.' — Chia-Chia Lin, author of The Unpassing
'The emotional intensity created by Boström Knausgård recalls Sylvia Plath, but her spare, accelerating modern myth owes something to the poet/classicist Anne Carson's novels in verse. This novella cannot be read quickly, its psychological range and febrile prose demand attentiveness. It takes skill and imagination to describe extreme emotions in ways to which everybody can relate but that's what Boström Knausgård achieves in this short, piercing book.' — The Independent
'This intriguing, lyrical novel is a powerful portrait of mental illness.' — Times Literary Supplement
'The story is tightly, cleverly organized around a central idea: to show how Anna's perceptive, disturbed mind struggles to impose some kind of mental order and, finally, fails. The author's passionate involvement with her protagonist illuminates what it is like to slide irresistibly away from reality.' — Swedish Book Review
'Linda Boström Knausgård's style is magical, hallucinatory, and very poetic. Passionate, refined, and as clear as cool water.' —Aftonbladet
'The strangeness, originality, and supreme gentleness of the narrator's inner world contrast sharply with the more recognizable, though not in all respects ordinary world into which she is forced. This, combined with her quiet determination to find her father and the increasingly astonishing events that occur, all add up to form a surprisingly modern portrait of longing and the possibility of homecoming.' — Bookslut
LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD is a Swedish author and poet, as well as a producer of documentaries for national radio. Her first novel, The Helios Disaster, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States. Welcome to America, her second novel, was nominated for the prestigious Swedish August Prize and the Svenska Dagbladet Literary Prize in her home country, and was also longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award in the United States. October Child became a bestseller in Sweden and throughout Scandinavia, where it was published to great critical acclaim.
RACHEL WILLSON-BROYLES is a freelance translator based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She received her BA in Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2002 and her PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Other authors whose works she has translated include Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Jonas Jonasson, Malin Persson Giolito, and Linda Boström Knausgård.
