Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto - Softcover

Chapman, Maile

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224090429 ISBN 13: 9780224090421

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2010

Synopsis

In a remote, piney wood in Finland stands a convalescent hospital called Suvanto, a curving concrete example of austere Scandinavian design. It is the 1920s, and the patients, all women, seek relief from ailments real and imagined. On the lower floors are the stoic Finnish women; on the upper floors are foreign women of privilege-the "up-patients." They are tended to by head nurse Sunny Taylor, an American who has fled an ill-starred life only to retreat behind a mask of crisp professionalism.

On a late-summer day a new patient arrives on Sunny's ward-a faded, irascible former ballroom-dance instructor named Julia Dey. Sunny takes it upon herself to pierce the mystery of Julia's reserve. Soon, Julia's difficulty, her tightly coiled anger, places her at the centre of the ward's tangled emotional life.

As summer turns to autumn, and autumn to a long, dark winter, the patients hear rumours about changes being implemented at Suvanto by an American obstetrician, Dr. Peter Weber, who is experimenting with a new surgical stitch. Their familiar routine threatened, the women are not happy (they were not happy before), and the story's escalating menace builds to a terrifying conclusion.

About this title

Review:

Rural Finland may not seem a very likely locale for a gripping intellectual thriller, but pulling this off is merely the first of Maile Chapman's many accomplishments here. Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto - what a title! - is as creepy as Patricia Highsmith at her best and as psychologically sharp (and confounding) as early Ian McEwan. With its portrayal of how quickly the conscience in shipwreck succumbs to delusion, Chapman has written more than a beautifully observed and utterly convincing first novel: she has written something of unfakeable importance. (Tom Bissell)

Maile Chapman is one of my favorite writers and in Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto she has given us an eerie gift of a novel. It is a superb hallucinatory piercing, an ominous dispatch from that Gothic frontier of the Female Body. (Junot Díaz)

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is a lucid dream of a book; it is extremely clear and unnerving and full of gorgeously written surprises and frightening marvels (Audrey Niffenegger)

Book Description:

A brilliant and unnerving debut novel about the mysteriously ill patients at a remote hospital in Finland

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0224090429
• ISBN 13: 9780224090421
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272