A luminous and enchanting novel about life-changing moments and motherhood.
Author: Helmi Kekkonen
Finnish original: Vieraat
Publisher: Siltala, 2016
Genre: literary fiction
Number of pages: 190 pp.
Reading material: Finnish original
It is a beautiful day in late summer. The sky is blue and filled with brightly-coloured hot-air balloons. A man has gone out to buy roses, a woman puts on a white dress. All is well and everything is in place for the guests’ arrival: the wine has been chilled, the table laid.
“But too often, when things start to change, whatever things they may be, you notice too late: only once a lot has already happened, or things have stopped happening and life has come to a standstill–in a place no one wants to be.”
The hours pass, and each of the party guests is getting ready to attend, not knowing that this day of all days, this party of all parties, will see everything changing.
In The Guests, Helmi Kekkonen introduces the reader to a group of people who in different ways have arrived at crossroads in their lives and whose decisions have unforeseen and irrevocable consequences. These people, who all wander under the same hot Helsinki sky, are suddenly strangers, both to themselves and others. Running through the book is the engaging and far-reaching theme of parenthood and childhood. And we see how, once fulfilled, no wish, no piece of luck, no fear, is altogether as a person originally imagined it to be.
“The story begins in an excellent manner. A party is a classical opening, but how beautifully Kekkonen’s narration functions in the first chapter, using irony and distancing! The connections and disconnections of the guests who are groping towards each other are made visible at once. […] The Guests is an elegantly carried out novel about our most precious feelings and images, and their destruction.”
– Helsingin Sanomat newspaper
Also available:
Adult fiction
This Woman’s Life (2021)
Children’s books
Topsy-Turvy Anna (2019)
About the author:
Helmi Kekkonen