Author: Selja Ahava
Finnish original: Hän joka syvyydet näki
Publisher: Gummerus, 2025
Genre: literary fiction
Number of pages: 260 pp.
Reading materials: Finnish original, English sample, English synopsis
An enchanting rhapsody about love in the face of mortality
Liisa and Henrik are a middle-aged couple who share a great love, but also a great fear: death. Having met later in life, they grapple all too often with the fact that the time they get to share may not be so long after all. To keep the fear at bay, and to hang on to each other in the face of the inevitable, they tell each other stories.
One day while Henrik is away at sea, Liisa’s aunt, her only living older relative, falls deathly ill, and Liisa decides to deal with her approaching death and the looming fear the way she knows best, by telling a story. The result is a moving, ambitious rhapsody about love and death that collects the pieces of multiple narratives, myths, and tales, thus weaving together her and Henrik’s personal epic.
It is a collection of Greek myths, an exploration of the Epic of Gilgamesh, of wild scientific and natural discoveries, and of wonderfully human fates in the face of the inevitable end. It is the story of eight-year-old Meeri, who is declared brain dead after a routine surgery and whose mother refuses to turn off her ventilator for years, it is an account of the work of the Harvard committee tasked with redefining death in 1967, and it is the story of George Smith, an archeology enthusiast whose work put back together the pieces of one of oldest long-lost tales of humanity. It is a story about pursuing immortality the only way mankind can: by putting together something greater than themselves and consigning it to history.
Selja Ahava has established herself as a prominent literary voice in the Finnish scene: her Things That Fall From The Sky won the EU Literature Prize and was sold to 17 territories, and her production is read and reviewed with enthusiasm by both the general public and critics in Finland, where her works are published by Gummerus.
About the author
Selja Ahava