First Comes Summer

Description

The spellbinding story of a young woman’s dangerous passion as it plays out over the course of an eerie summer

In their remote Viking settlement, Folkví and her brother, Áslakr, have always been close—unnaturally close. They’ve grown more intimate still as Folkví learns her shaman mother’s craft, as men regard her with newly devouring eyes. Then illness carries off their parents, and the nest of home is shattered. Áslakr sets off on his first expedition, abandoning Folkví to the dark of an endless winter. When he returns, he’s done the unthinkable: He’s found someone else to love.

Sick with grief, Folkví rages to the gods where they sit at the foot of an ancient tree, contemplating the twisted passions of humans that play out in the face of an ever-approaching end of days. Will none of them save her now? Very well, Folkví will save herself. The wedding date is set. But first comes a fateful summer. . . 

Deeply unsettling and brilliantly imagined, First Comes Summer captures the terror of losing the world you’ve always known—and the uncanny extremes to which you might go to hold on to it.Praise for First Comes Summer:

“[A] sparse and spellbinding novel. . . . Hesselager’s deft writing throughout this mysterious story continuously unsettles in the best way possible, prompting readers to lean in even as things spiral out of control.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Poetic, enigmatic. . . . [and] remarkable. . . . It is mysterious and utterly compelling.”  —Center for Fiction

“A magical book about love and death and the slender, enduring line that connects the two.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“This lucent, poetic, mysterious novel takes us deep into the shrouded past, into an ancient world that is both utterly alien and achingly, recognizably human. First Comes Summer is a miniature masterpiece.”  —Dan Chaon, National Book Award finalist and New York Times-bestselling author of Sleepwalk and Among the Missing

“A terrifying tale about the special madness of obsessive love. Masterfully told, with an ending that will leave you speechless.” —Alma Katsu, author of The Fervor and The Hunger

“Marvelously imagined and fiercely real, First Comes Summer has a tender brutality to it that feels timeless and fresh at the same time. Engrossing, primal, and very very beautiful.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun and You Too Can Have a Body Like MineMaria Hesselager has won and been shortlisted for several Scandinavian prizes. First Comes Summer is her first novel. She lives in Copenhagen.

Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian. He received the 2019 PEN America Translation Prize, among many other honors.US

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