Author: Marisha Rasi-Koskinen
Finnish original: Kesuura
Publisher: S&S, 2025
Genre: literary fiction
Number of pages: 450 pp
Reading material: Finnish original, English sample, English synopsis
A masterful exploration of humanness through the eyes of the other.
It’s an abandoned railway station that nobody has visited in decades. Fells are looming in the horizon, and the sun never sets. An android called QED doesn’t know why they are there. The human has brought them to the station. Are they running away, or are they searching for something?
The human doesn’t talk much, except demanding that QED writes down all the memories on paper. And so QED writes: about its childhood and parents, about their life in the Forest-Northwest, its animals and insects; about the school, and other schoolmates. The further the writing goes, the harder it becomes to remember. There is one name that only brings radiating pain instead of memories. Has someone tampered with QED’s recollections? Caesura is an immersive and haunting exploration of mind, pain, and compassion, a study of what constitutes being a human. Drawing comparisons to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Rasi-Koskinen’s new novel encourages the reader to ask: am I human enough?
About the author
Marisha Rasi-Koskinen