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A Novel
by Ia Genberg
A woman lies bedridden from a high fever. Suddenly she is struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past.
An intoxicating novel in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, about a woman in the throes of a fever remembering the important people in her past, her memories laid bare in vivid detail as her body temperature rises.
Inside the book is an inscription: a get-well-soon message from Johanna, an ex-girlfriend who is now a famous television host. As she flips through the book, pages from the woman's own past begin to come alive, scenes of events and people she cannot forget.
There are moments with Johanna, and Niki, the friend who disappeared years ago without a phone number or an address and with no online footprint. There is Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Brigitte, whose elusive qualities mask a painful secret.
The Details is a novel built around four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is the real subject of the portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories. The result is an intimate and illuminating study of what it means to be human.
"A fever dream... . Genberg's prose is a feat of characterization, a triumph of lending language and profundity to observations of daily life....I didn't read it so much as subconsciously absorb it." —Literary Hub
"Takes readers on a woozy, affecting dive into desire, domination and memory....The Details was a bestseller in Sweden, where it won The August Prize for best fiction book of 2022. An elegant translation by Kira Josefsson deserves to repeat that success. [Genberg has an] empathetic approach to the quirks and failings of her characters. All there is to the self, observes the narrator, are the 'traces of the people we rub up against'. The greatest achievement of this short and affecting novel is its presentation of those encounters as one long fever dream." —Financial Times (UK)
"The literal fever that begins the book mirrors the feverish beginnings and endings of these relationships, as well as the fever of reading—how it forces the reader inward, then leaves an invisible imprint in its wake. Genberg's marvelous prose is also a kind of fever, mesmerizing and hot to the touch." —New York Times Book Review
"The non-linear narrative renders the protagonist both vivid and obscure – the perfect conduit for this compelling, uncannily precise meditation on transcience." —The Observer (UK)
"The Details reads like a confession or a slice of autofiction. It has the smooth documentary realism of a life reconstructed in close-up. It has the deceptively artless air of unmediated experience....It's the sort of novel, too, in which young attractive people hang about drinking wine and coffee, discussing literature and having sex with a distinctly matter-of-fact European cool. The Details, which takes place over several decades, revels in seductive nostalgia for what has irretrievably disappeared or exists only as a memory, but it also sets up a tension with our tech-saturated age in which both are much rarer phenomena." —The Times (UK)
"This beautiful, moving book unfolds in four stand-alone portraits that, together, yield a sharp, poignant picture of the portraitist. The narrative blurs the boundaries that separate memoir from fiction, past from present, and self from other, which evokes the spell of fever during which it was written. The miraculous sort of novel that fuses with our personal memories and becomes part of us." —Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Trust
"The Details is about relationships, about love, about parents and children ... about all of it. The little observations about being young, and about growing up, and about getting lost by accident, and getting lost on purpose, searching for yourself in everyone else ... damn it, I've underlined half of the book. I wish I could write like this." — #1 New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman
"The non-linear narrative renders the protagonist both vivid and obscure – the perfect conduit for this compelling, uncannily precise meditation on transcience." —The Observer (London)
"The Details reads like a confession or a slice of autofiction. It has the smooth documentary realism of a life reconstructed in close-up. It has the deceptively artless air of unmediated experience....It's the sort of novel, too, in which young attractive people hang about drinking wine and coffee, discussing literature and having sex with a distinctly matter-of-fact European cool. The Details, which takes place over several decades, revels in seductive nostalgia for what has irretrievably disappeared or exists only as a memory, but it also sets up a tension with our tech-saturated age in which both are much rarer phenomena." —The Times (London)
This information about The Details 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.
la Genberg began her writing career as a journalist. She is the author of the novels Söta fredag (Sweet Friday) Sent farväl (Belated farewell), and The Details, her English language debut, which won the 2022 August Prize; and the short story collection Klen tröst & fyra andra berättelser om pengar (Small comfort & four other tales about money). She lives in Sweden.
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