A Blessed Child

From the internationally acclaimed author of Stella Descending and Grace, a captivating story of sisterhood and of the inescapable chords of childhood memory.\

Every summer Isak Lövenstad gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarsö. Here Erika, Laura, and Molly know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none compares to Erika’s bond with the rebellious misfit Ragnar, the intensity of which makes them inseparable. But when they reach the age of fourteen and their relationship threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar’s outcast state, she suddenly turns away—a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to forever alter Isak’s family. Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarsö to see their father—now eighty, a bereaved widower, and in year-round exile there—the three women confront, finally, the specter of that awful summer, the mark of which each has since carried.

Bold and starkly beautiful, A Blessed Child is a haunting parable of innocence lost.

Linn Ullmann is a graduate of New York University, where she studied English literature and began work on a Ph.D. She returned to her native Oslo in 1990 to pursue a career in journalism. A prominent literary critic, she also writes a column for Norway's leading morning newspaper and has published four novels. She lives in Oslo.