Persson Giolito Malin: Živi pijesak

Malin Persson Giolito: Quicksand

One mass murder in an elite high school. One suspect is an eighteen-year-old girl. And too many difficult questions. Are we all innocent until proven guilty? The crime committed at a school in the richest district of Stockholm shook Sweden, and overnight turned Maja Norberg from a successful student and a good daughter from a rich family into the most hated teenager in the country. What really happened in the classroom where Maya's boyfriend and her best friend lost their lives? Or better: what happened before - in her parents' homes and classrooms, at parties full of drugs and sex, in forbidden immigrant suburbs and on luxury yachts - ever since Sebastian Fagerman, the beautiful and disturbing son of one of Sweden's most powerful men, entered her life? In the devastating psychological thriller Quicksand, declared the best Nordic and the best European crime fiction of 2018, the celebrated author Malin Persson Giolito not only puts us in front of the fascinating literary character Maja Norberg, but also in front of the doubt whether we are looking into the eyes of a cold-blooded executioner or a newly lost girl, who herself has lost the ones she loved. Quicksand takes us all the way to the dark heart of the affluent society, relentlessly asking questions about the nature of love and guilt and the spiral of their destructive or beneficial consequences. And let no one have any illusions: Maja Norberg will not be the only one on trial in the courtroom where she is being ushered. "Quicksand is a novel that begins like a game gone awry: already on the first page, a small cross-section of contemporary Swedish society - a hyper-correct teacher, an adopted boy from Uganda, a blonde dressed in cashmere, the son of immigrants from the Middle East - lies on the floor covered in blood, as a dark satire of the image of the country of civilized multiculturalism that Sweden cultivates about itself..." – New York Times Book Review "Quicksand is a novel about a mass murder in a high school, but it actually deals with something else entirely: loyalty and interdependence, love and guilt, the incredibly complex business of being a teenager, the criminal justice system (in Sweden and in general), the role of the media and everything that parental duties consist of... Through Quicksand , we are led by tense anticipation, not only in relation to the Maja verdict but also the deceptive 'truth' about what really happened in the classroom that day." – Shelf Awareness "Quicksand is not whodunit, but whydunit. What did Maja really do - or didn't she do? Searching for answers, Persson Giolito will use her heroine to open ever wider questions. What is 'truth'? Or 'justice'? How much inequality can a society endure and at the same time remain stable?" – World Literature Today "This is a unique novel, a novel that rises above most other novels published in recent years in the crime genre." – Aftonbladet "Giolito leaves us wondering for a long time what the end will be like, and when it finally comes, it is exactly as it should have been." – Washington Post “Quicksand is structured like a trial, but it clearly goes beyond those frameworks by addressing both the Swedish economic and racial tensions that lurk beneath the surface.” – New York Times "The one who connects all the stories about the massacre and its victims is Maja; in a voice that is sometimes quarrelsome, petty and distant, and sometimes extremely sensitive and painfully vulnerable. Her narration connects past and present events, offering us pieces of the story that preceded the trial we are witnessing." – Kirkus Reviews