Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The shoe of a child who went missing in the fog many years ago is sent to his infirm grandfather…
What about the Johan Theorin?
This one is so interesting. I judged the International Daggers this year and he was highly commended. It’s his first novel and it’s set on Øland, an island in the Baltic off Sweden. Many years ago a small boy disappeared. He just climbed over his parents’ garden wall and went into the fog.
Is this true?
No, in the novel. And his mother has fallen apart and his grandfather is in residential care. He’s really, really good on ageing – on losing the ability to make the body do what it should. Anyway, the grandfather has the child’s shoe sent to him in the post.
That’s so exciting!
It’s a really good novel. It’s a first novel, you know, so it could have been tightened up a bit but he’s very good on the sense of place and the industry that used to be there but is gone. Quarrying and the ships that once came in but don’t any more.
All these novels seem to be permeated by loss. Is that fair?
Absolutely. They are all rural too and there is a sense of the landscape that can be hostile.
Read full interview
Ann Cleeves, a celebrated crime writer and winner of the 2006 Golden Dagger, finds inspiration in Nordic crime fiction and is gripped by the sense of loss and isolation that permeates the rural communities in the novels she has chosen. She began writing when she and her husband were the only residents on an island nature reserve in the Dee estuary.
