Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Dec 2015
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
An exhilarating modern fairy tale about what happens when the tragic and mundane collide with the strange and wonderful.
Nella and her brother Robert live a difficult life with their mother and father in a small town on the west coast of Sweden. Robert is bullied at school, and Nella has to resort to debt and petty crime to pay off his tormentors. When she turns to her friend Tommy for help, her suspicions are aroused by the mysterious comings and goings of his brothers at their dilapidated boat house. But when she uncovers the reason behind their enigmatic behavior, her life is opened to the realities of a mindboggling secret.
The Merman is a dark and haunting novel about sibling love and betrayal - and about what happens when the mundane collides with the strange and beautiful.
"Starred Review. A grim and moving contemporary fairy tale." - Kirkus
"A dark, brooding Scandinavian fantasy. A hauntingly effective fable." - Booklist
"A gloriously inventive historical adventure." - The Times (UK)
"Sensational. Vallgren has a superb talent, and makes witty and convincing cameos of the infamous and the great." - The Financial Times (UK)
"Frame[s] the everyday with an almost medieval fascination with the grotesque and the macabre." - Metro (UK)
"There are some nicely observed episodes here and disturbing metaphors that offer brilliant, brief illuminations of his brutal subject matter." - The New Statesman (UK)
This information about The Merman was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Carl-Johan Vallgren is the author of eight novels, two of which, The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-reading Monster Hercules Barefoot and Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler, have been translated into English. His novels have been translated into eleven languages. He lives in Stockholm.
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