Protected: I Wish It Wasn’t My Job to Ask You About Jelly

In addition to being a novelist, Therese Bohman’s resume also includes arts journalism. As a regular contributor to one of Sweden’s largest newspapers, Bohman is, by trade, interested in the details underpinning notable events and evolving dynamics. Unsurprisingly, in Mount Verity, her fifth novel, the vagaries of human relationships are at the center of the narrative.

Hanna Hallman’s life is changed forever when her fifteen-year-old brother Erik disappears on Easter Saturday in 1989. He and his friends set off for Mount Verity, the location of an infamous cave allegedly used during the Östergötland witch trials in the seventeenth century. Rumor has it that anyone who goes into the cave and fails to tell the truth will never be seen again. Which begs the question: What happened to Erik?

In her exploration of this question, Bohman focuses on the reverberations of a single event. For Hanna, every detail of her existence—her schooling, her work, her ambitions, her relationships with others—is colored by Erik’s disappearance. With a journalistic absence of sentimentality, Bohman draws the reader into Hanna’s world. The excerpt below introduces Hanna amid the tedium of a part-time job at a call center, where a monotonous setting and half-hearted social life are insufficient distractions from the memories of Erik, which are resurfacing in her dreams. 

– Marlaine Delargy
Translator of Mount Verity