City of My Dreams

CITY OF MY DREAMS conveys the way of life--its textures, rhythms, smells, patterns, trials, and joys--of the poor but proud in 19th C Stockholm. It is not a historical novel in the usual sense, but a deeply contemporary reconstruction of the past by a writer who was in love with the city in which he spent his life and knew everything there was to know about it. Framed as a series of sequences that accumulate in emotional power and grip the reader ever more tightly, it is compulsively readable and deeply moving.

Although it is set in Stockholm and details Swedish life with loving care, the author's vision is so universal that the reader ultimately forgets its foreigness. The translation is sensitive to the music of the original and creates a strong English equivalent that makes it seem it was written in English to begin with--you forget you are reading a translation. You forget, in fact, that you are reading, and get lost in the story.