A Serbian holiday

Sorry about the silence—been trying to get over the Brexit horror. I’m not sure the reality has quite sunk in yet. In addition to the multitude of other consequences, what impact will Brexit have on the future of publishing books in translation in the UK, the number of which has been on a significant rise over the past years ?

Despite all the confusion, fear, and sadness I will try to gather my thoughts and review the great book that is Kati Hiekkapelto‘s Tumma (Otava, 2016)! This is the third book in her series on the Yugoslavian-born detective Anna Fekete, who lives and works in Finland, and will be published in English with the title The Exiled later this year by Orenda Books. Orenda also published the two first installments, and you can read my thoughts on the previous book, The Defenceless, here.

After the murder of her father, also a police officer, in the 1980s and the start of the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s, young Anna flees to Finland with her mother and brother Àkos. But even after nearly 30 years, the past won’t leave her alone. The Exiled begins almost directly where The Defenceless ended: after a long winter, Anna is finally on summer holiday and travels to the borderlands of Serbia and Hungary to visit her family and friends. Her mother has moved back, and even her recovering alcoholic brother, who Anna begins to realise has been her strength and stay in Finland as well as the only link to her roots, is planning on remaining in their home village after falling in love with a local during a visit.

 

Tiszavirag, the hatching of a local mayfly species, which the locals call ‘the blooming of the river Tisza’

Finnish literature in focus: Kati Hiekkapelto—The Defenceless

Kati Hiekkapelto (b. 1970) has an interesting background. She hails from the northern city of Oulu, and studied fine art and special education before working with immigrant children as a special needs teacher. She lives on a 200-year-old farm in the countryside, which means she gets to spend the long, dark, and cold Finnish winters not only writing, but also chopping wood and shovelling snow. Hiekkapelto speaks fluent Hungarian, thanks to having lived in the Hungarian-speaking part of Serbia.

Kati Hiekkapelto

Hiekkapelto’s genre is crime fiction, the Nordic noir, and her heroine Anna Fekete, a 30-something detective whose family escaped Hungarian speaking Serbia to an unnamed city somewhere in northern Finland during the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s. The first book in the Fekete series, The Hummingbird (Kolibri), was published in Finnish by Otava in 2013 and in English a year later. The other two parts to come out so far are The Defenceless (Suojattomat, 2014), and The Exiled (Tumma, 2016). Hiekkapelto won the prize for the best detective novel, awarded by The Finnish Whodunnit Society, in 2015.