A Blessed Child

by Linn Ullmann (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.36

  Every summer throughout their childhood, Erika, Molly and Laura, half-sisters by different mothers, gather on the magical Baltic island of Hammarsoe to stay with their charismatic father, Isak. Until one year when a childhood betrayal causes an incident of such senseless cruelty that it alters forever each sister's life. Twenty-five years later, the three women return to the island to see their father, and finally confront the spectre that has continued to haunt them.

  `A Blessed Child is like a fine, long evening of light. There are all sorts of colours on the horizon, and even when the darkness becomes visible, there is still a place to turn to. This is a book for fathers and daughters, and for anyone who's beguiled by the country of family. The language is clear and runs deep. The story is profound and touching. Together, they announce another great story-telling feat by Linn Ullmann. She reminds me of Berger, or Acimna, of Toibin: no greater praise'

  Colum McCann

  `Ullmann wants us to be patient as she is patient, and it's worth it; for the accomplished writing and to spend time on Hammarsoe, which is the greatest character in this book; a fascinating island with its African landscape, its Norse customs, its blood-fat ticks and wild strawberries, its late-blooming lilac and rumours of bears'

  Guardian

  `Abounding in the inner correspondences usually associated with lyric poetry - resonant changes are rung on 400-million-year old rocks, birds, ticks, a boy running, Prospero and Caliban - A Blessed Child shows Ullmann asserting the indestructibility of the imagination, whether a social outcast's or a trapped insider's'

  TLS

  `First affecting, then alarming, sometimes acerbically comic, A Blessed Child has an exhilarating candour and clarity in its grasp of family, period and place'

  Boyd Tonkin, Independent

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $4.65

  Isak Lovenstad is a pioneering obstetrician - and a powerful, charismatic womanizer. Every summer he gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarso. Here Erika, Molly and Laura know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of other children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none is comparable to Erika's bond with Ragnar, a rebellious misfit whose intensity makes them inseparable. But when they turn fourteen, and their relationship threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar's outcast state, she turns away suddenly - a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to alter forever each sister's life.Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarso to see their father - now eighty-four and in year-round exile there - the three women confront, finally, the spectre of that awful summer whose mark each has since carried. Bold and starkly beautiful, A Blessed Child is a haunting parable of innocence lost. Praise for Grace : 'Clear-sighted, large-hearted fiction without illusions but never without pity - or without humour' - Independent . 'Extraordinarily fearless ...moving and convincing ...This is a work of the most intricate and impressive artistry' - Independent on Sunday .