A Blessed Child

by Linn Ullmann

Translated from the original Norwegian by Sarah Death

From the internationally praised author of Stella Descending and Grace, a captivating story of sisterhood and of the inescapable cords of childhood memory.
Isak Lovenstad is a pioneering obstetrician – and a powerful, charismatic womanizer. Every summer he gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarsö. Here Erika, Molly and Laura know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of other children, each undergoes the rites of growing up. Though many alliances form and dissolve, none is comparable to Erika’s bond with Ragnar, a rebellious misfit whose intensity makes them inseparable. But when they turn fourteen, and their relationship threatens to relegate Erika to Ragnar’s outcast state, she turns away suddenly – a common enough teenage betrayal that nonetheless precipitates an incident of such senseless cruelty as to alter forever each sister’s life. Twenty-five years later, returning to Hammarsö to see their father – now eighty-four and in year-round exile there – the three women confront, finally, the spectre of that awful summer whose mark each has since carried.
Bold and starkly beautiful, A Blessed Child is a haunting parable of innocence lost.

Linn Ullmann is a graduate of New York University, where she studied English literature and began work on a Ph.D. She returned to her native Oslo in 1990 to pursue a career in journalism. A prominent literary critic, she also writes a column for Norway’s leading morning newspaper. She lives in Oslo with her husband and their children