The Heart Echoes

Description

Swedish sisters Astrid, Lena, and Sandra have struggled to get along since childhood, but when Lena is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, they are each thrown into crisis together. Astrid's well-ordered, predictable world is shaken by the return of her ex-boyfriend Michael, an American who abandoned her-and their infant son-years earlier. While Astrid has remarried and had more children, she is suffocating under her husband's kindness and cannot escape the pull of the past. Seeing Michael at their son's high school graduation reawakens her grief and rage, along with more complicated and threatening emotions. Envious of Astrid's seemingly stable life, Sandra is married to an alcoholic and drowning in debt. She turns to Lena for help at the worst possible time. Lena, fighting to stay alive, must finally confront a devastating secret she's kept from Astrid since the summer Michael left. As the walls they've built between them crumble, the three sisters must try to forgive and to rebuild their shattered bonds...while there's still time.

Helena von Zweigbergk is a Swedish novelist, journalist, and popular radio host. Her fiction has covered subjects ranging from contemporary family drama to a crime series about a women's pris-on chaplain. Her most recent book is a biography of the lead singer of Roxette, Marie Fredriksson, cowritten with the subject. The Heart Echoes is her first novel available in English translation.

"Across all her novels, von Zweigbergk's gift is to give us nuanced, deeply developed characters through whom we experience all hues of the human experience. In The Heart Echoes, she gives us three sisters, each of whom grapples with the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human-ego, the limitation and redemptive power of love, and the inevitability of mortality. As readers, we aren't merely entertained by her skillful narrative pacing, but edified along with her characters' growing wisdom through their journeys." -David Lagercrantz, acclaimed Swedish journalist and author of The Girl in the Spider's Web