The Thick of the Forest by Linnea Kuuluvainen continues to succeed: after a glowing review from critics, it is now quickly becoming a readers’ favourite in Finnish libraries, making the top 10 list of the most reserved titles.
The Thick of the Forest by Linnea Kuuluvainen, one of this year’s strongest debuts from Finland, is on a roll: after scoring a glowing review on the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, it is now in the top 10 of the most reserved titles in the libraries of the Helsinki Metropolitan area, the most densely populated area of the country. Kuuluvainen’s debut is in the great company of, among others, Satu Rämö and Iida Turpeinen.
The Thick of the Forest is set in a near future where nature has started fighting back against humanity, destroying the world as we know it. To escape nature’s vengeance and isolate themselves from it as well as they can, people have fled to small city-states surrounded by walls. One of them is the former city of Turku, where a tightly guarded Nation has been established. Ingrid grew up in this new world, and has lived all her life in the Nation. After her mother’s death, she gets a job with a research group called Wild Rosemary, whose task is to map the conditions outside the walls of the Nation. Although the forest has been pacified, it is still angry and dangerous, and soon there is discord among the researchers as well.
The Thick of the Forest is an entrancing and linguistically captivating first novel about a forest that haunts people and two women, Edla and Ingrid, whose stories intersect. The result is a rich telling of the relationship between mankind and nature, and of how the lines dividing them become increasingly blurry in the depth of the forest. The book is published by Gummerus.
Author Linnea Kuuluvainen (b. 1996) has studied Finnish language and writing, and is one of the most promising up-and-coming voices from Finland.
Congratulations to the author and the publisher, and way to go!