City of Light

The Angel House is the third novel in the celebrated Swedish novelist Kerstin Ekman's popular quartet of novels she wrote between 1974 and 1983. The first two novels, Witches' Rings and The Spring, were published to excellent reviews and many readers have been looking forward to the next installment of this tale about the lives of working-class women and children in a small Swedish town. The Angel House opens in the late 1920s and follows characters familiar from the previous novel through to the 1940s. The women are now free from the hard physical tasks of the earlier novels, but no less trapped in the grinding repetition of factory jobs, repressive unions, and domestic chores in the isolation of their new homes. A male hierarchy still dominates the town; time is ruled by financial imperatives, council chairman's gavels, factory whistles, and military orders. Against this Ekman sets the remnants of a more organic timescale, governed by the slow evolution of women's bodies, the nurture of informal networks, and the unhurried cycles of trees and fruit bushes in old gardens.


Genre: Literary Fiction