Light and Flame by Ulla-Lena Lundberg is travelling to Croatia, where it will be published by Hena, the publisher of Lundberg’s Finlandia winning title Ice.
Fantastic news from Croatia: Hena will be publishing Light and Flame by Ulla-Lena Lundberg.
In Light and Flame, it is August 1852, and the city of Vaasa on Finland’s west coast has burned to the ground. The Swedish-speaking maid Betty can no longer find work and, although she possesses neither money nor fluency in Finnish, sets out on foot to seek a livelihood in the capital.
Betty’s trek begins a three-generation trip through the stormy years of Finland’s transformation into a nation, as successive Russification, independence, and civil war throw society into turmoil.
The new nation is also an educational project. Betty’s daughter Olga becomes a teacher, and Olga’s husband Robert the headmaster of a uniquely Nordic phenomenon, the folk high school. Impassioned conversation by impassioned conversation, the worker’s rights’ movement and cultural and educational movements wage battle on behalf of an independent Finland.
Whereas men stagger and are trampled beneath their ideologies, women stay standing, work, tend to their families, doubt, hope, and love.
Hena is based in Zagreb and boasts a list of authors that includes some of the most significant Croatian and foreign writers, such as Ante Tomić, Stjepo Martinović, Mary Novosel, Pero Kvesić, Marina Vujčić, Umberto Eco, Peter D’Adamo, Amos Oz, Don DeLillo, Ken Bruen, Elif Shafak, Louise Penny, Ahmet Umit, Ayfer Tunc, Michela Murgia, Ece Temelkuran, Jana Benova. Hena is also the Croatian home of the Finlandia award-winning title Ice by Ulla-Lena Lundberg, and the two titles will be part of the same series.
Congratulations to the author and the publisher!