This is where the story begins: when something ends.
Author: Marjo Niemi
Finnish original: Miten niin valo
Publisher: Teos Publishers, 2008
Genre: Literary fiction
Number of pages: 192 pp.
Reading material: Finnish original, English sample, German sample
Anni has given her marriage everything. She has adapted, taken an interest, looked deeper and covered failures. Yet now the middle-class dream has come to dust, and Anni is lying on the kitchen floor for the second week in a row.
Kristiina is a painter. She is single and lives a sober, restricted life. Her routines are broken, however, by a telephone call from a man she cannot shake off.
Doctor Päivikki Siven works in the hospital where both Anni and Kristiina are taken. Her world and reality are filled with facts and control. Both her children and husband are gliding further away from her orderly mind. But then Anni and Kristiina turn her perfect world upside down.
Why the Light is a story of situations where a wakening to reality has taken place irrevocably and the future lies wide open. It is a frenzied, furious, honest book, in which language moves on with magic skill, revealing everything.
“Why the Light fascinates, as did its predecessor, The Run (2004), above all thanks to its language that stimulates all the senses. Niemi’s ability to paint verbal landscapes and compose new euphonious metaphors is enviable…”
–Hämeen Sanomat newspaper
Also available:
Hearing (2021)
The Mother of All Losses (2017)
A Cannibal’s Friendship (2012)
The Run (2004)
About the author:
Marjo Niemi