A Fortune Foretold: A Girl's Memoir

(Paperback)

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The story takes place in the 1950s in the suburbs of Stockholm, in the university town of Lund, and in the United States. Neta's childhood is in disarray. She reads - words give form to the vagueness of existence - and is busy thinking about the female sex, family, and the stupendous diversity of people in the world. Her father, a mathematician, and her mother, a musician, are in constant conflict, but she loves them both. Gradually Neta realizes that she's grown up in a lie and that she must step carefully through the war zone of her parents' marriage.

Reviews

Deeply inquisitive A delicate study of a young girl's maturation, airy and filled with imagery of lightfunny, familiar, and profound. KIRKUS REVIEWS

Pleijels fictional autobiography is distinctly written, melancholic in tone, yet there is hope and humor behind the darkness. [A FORTUNE FORETOLD] will strike a chord with lovers of literary historical fiction and those interested in exploring adolescence and the human condition in an evocative time and place. BOOKLIST

Lucidly written autobiographical novel from distinguished Swedish author/critic Pleijelreaders who enjoy coming-of-age stories will appreciate how Pleijel refreshes the trop, realistically giving us a young heroine who understands the world in bits and pieces, as if flying through clouds. LIBRARY JOURNAL

Poignant with humble prose, Pleijels memoir reflects upon feelings and questions both familiar and relatable as she grows to understand life and people in wholly different ways. WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

It sometimes happens that a writer manages to find and swing open the well-hidden doors to the very heart of their literary passions and expressions. This is what acclaimed Swedish poet, playwright and novelist Agneta Pleijel has managed to do. The result is a brave, beautiful and engaging tale of a young woman navigating the potentially treacherous waters between the erotic cravings of the adolescent body and the poetic hunger of the literary and intellectual mind. Gran Rosenberg, author of A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

[A Fortune Foretolds] dissociated narrative styleadroitly complements the narrators striving to reassemble and reconcile a distant, chaotic, peripatetic life. Highly recommended. HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW

Author Bio

Agneta Pleijel was born in Stockholmin 1940. She has worked as a critic and cultural editor for various Swedish newspapers and magazines. She served as president of the Swedish PEN between 1987 and 1990, and has been a member of the academy Samfundet de Nio (The Nine Society) since 1988. From 1992 to 1996, Pleijel was a professor at the Institute of Drama in Stockholm. Apart from being one of Sweden's foremost novelists, she is also a playwright and a poet. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Marlaine Delargy has translated novels by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Kristina Ohlsson, and Helene Tursten, as well as The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist and Therese Bohman's Drowned and The Other Woman. She lives in England.