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| from Snow
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| Ellen
Mattson |
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Translated
and introduced by Sarah Death |
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|  Ellen
Mattson was born in 1962 on Sweden’s west coast and is
the daughter of children’s book author Olle Mattson.
She has lived in Uddevalla for many years. She has worked in
librarianship and now writes literary criticism alongside her
novels.
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 Snow was
described by Jan Arnald in Göteborgs-Posten (24.08.01)
as “a compact, angular little novel that’s
hard not to love”.
Original
Title: Snö
Publisher:
Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2001, 194 pages. ISBN: 9100576654 It
is 1718 and deepest winter in an unnamed little town on
the west coast of Sweden that is about to go down in history.
Karl XII, the “warrior king”, has just met
his end on the battlefield across the border in Norway.
Soon his body will be brought to the town to be embalmed
by the royal physician and straggling hordes of starving,
frostbitten, wounded troops will also make their way there,
putting huge demands on the resources of the little community.
Jakob Törn is the town’s apothecary and by his
own admission a second-rate one, a reject from a nobler
profession. As the novel opens, he is a perplexed refugee
from his own home, where his hot-blooded wife reacted in
an unexpectedly brutal manner when he told her the news
of the king’s death.
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| Previous
novels: |
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Nattvandring (Night
Walk, 1992) |
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Vägen
härifrån (The Way From Here,
1995) |
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Resenärerna (The
Travellers, 1998, winner of Svenska Dagbladets literary
prize) |
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Poetens
liv (The Life of the Poet, 1999, also
published in German by Klett-Cotta) |
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| Contents of the 2003:1
issue |
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