The weekend before last an Indie Book Flea was held outside of the Brooklyn Public Library.  I was there with Lori from TNBBC because, let’s be honest, we’re geeks who live for that kind of thing.  There was a bunch of great publishers and chapbook presses there and I ended up buying from quite a few of them – Seven Stories, One Story, Ugly Duckling Presse, Double Cross Press – all of whom I plan to talk about in the weeks after WITMonth (aka – Women In Translation Month). But right now I want to talk about some really exciting news I heard at the Other Press table.

The Swedish author Therese Bohman, whose novel Drowned I reviewed in 2012 and which remains on my favorite-books-of-all-time shelf, has a new novel coming out in English in February, 2016.  The title is The Other Woman. Marlaine Delargy is again translating. Below is the description from the Penguin Random House website (Other Press is an imprint) –

From the author of Drowned, a passionate psychological drama where questions of power and sexuality are brought to a head.

She works at Norrköping Hospital, at the very bottom of the hierarchy: in the cafeteria, below the doctors, the nurses, and the nursing assistants. But she dreams of one day becoming a writer, of moving away and reinventing herself.

Carl Malmberg, an older, married doctor at the hospital, catches her eye. She begins an intense affair with him, though struggling with the knowledge that he may never be hers. At the same time, she realizes that their attraction to each other is governed by their differences in social status. As her doubts increase, the revelation of a secret no one could have predicted forces her to take her own destiny in hand.

The news had me picking up my copy of Drowned again and revisiting my old review from 2012. Everything I wrote then still holds true today (which is always a relief), though I did make a new connection I didn’t make back then.  Last year I read the Château d’Argol by Julien Gracq, tr. Louise Varése – an example of both Gothicism and German Romanticism.  Drowned, which also uses nature as symbolism and foreshadowing, shares many of the same techniques and themes – albeit written in a more straight forward prose style.

Click on the cover to read my review of Therese Bohman’s Drowned.