Linnea Kuuluvainen’s dystopian debut The Thick of the Forest is travelling to Croatia, where it will be published by Hangar 7.
The Thick of the Forest by Linnea Kuuluvainen, one of this year’s strongest debuts, has begun its journey into the world and is travelling to Croatia, where it will be published by Hangar 7.
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.
Mixing elements from Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the unique setting of a Finnish forest capable of utter destruction, 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. In Finland, the book is published by Gummerus, and has been welcomed with glowing reviews by Finnish critics and media.
Hangar 7 is a Croatian publisher with a focus on high-quality spe-fi and fantasy literature. They are the Croatian home of, among others, Christelle Dabos, Terry Pratchett, and Brandon Sanderson.
Congratulations to the author and the publisher!