Böcker av Laura van den Berg

An NPR Best Book of 2013Laura van den Berg's gorgeous new book, The Isle of Youth, explores the lives of women mired in secrecy and deception. From a newlywed caught in an inscrutable marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, the characters in these bewitching stories are at once vulnerable and dangerous, bighearted and ruthless, and they will do what it takes to survive. Each tale is spun with elegant urgency, and the reader grows attached to the marginalized young women in these stories-women grappling with the choices they've made and searching for the clues to unlock their inner worlds. This is the work of a fearless writer whose stories feel both magical and mystical, earning her the title of "sorceress" from her readers. Be prepared to fall under her spell.

"A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida's underbelly, from a reality-warping storyteller"--

Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthday The dark of the Hospital at night. My mother s face, when she was young.Things other people will forget: where they come from, how old they are, the faces of the people they love. The right words for bowl and sunshine What is a beginning and whatis an end.Joy spends her days working the graveyard shift at a store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with silver blisters and memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. At once a hauntingly beautiful portrayal of a dystopian future and a powerful exploration of loneliness.

The Isle of Youth journeys through lives mired in secrecy and deception. From a newlywed marooned on honeymoon in Patagonia, to an abandoned tourist trailing a troupe of Parisian acrobats, to a woman who travels to Antarctica to unpick the secrets of her brother's death, the characters in these mesmerizing stories are complicated, vulnerable, and ruthless - afflicted by desires which they try to satisfy despite never knowing what they truly are. Each tale in this collection is by turns magical and brutal, making the unusual seem plausible and the impossible suddenly likely. Van den Berg tinges her landscapes with a sense of the surreal, inviting readers to recognise - as her characters do - the surprising ways in which the familiar can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours. 'Laura's stories are uniformly excellent - emotionally complex, very raw - but always with a mixture of pathos and humour that made me think of Lorrie Moore.' Dave Eggers 'Absolutely captivating.'Vanity Fair 'Laura van den Berg is one of the most freakishly talented young writers at work today, and a master of the short story form. Hers are deliciously unnerving, moving, and monstrous tales.' Karen Russell