Photo of Iida Rauma

Iida Rauma’s (b. 1984) debut novel The Book of Disappearances was published in 2011 and nominated for the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize. Her 2015 novel Of Sex and Mathematics was nominated for the European Union Prize for Literature and won both the Kalevi Jäntti Prize and the Torch-Bearer Prize. Rauma has a master’s degree in political science with a specialization in political history. She lives in Turku.

© Picture Marek Sabogal

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Hävitys (Destruction)

Iida Rauma’s third novel succeeds at the impossible. The furious urge to remember, a love for the marvelous history of a burned and demolished city as well as pain that strikes at the core are woven into a stunning tableau of violence, its rings spreading out to the ends of the earth. Destruction demonstrates the ability of literature to tell the truth when all other ways of speaking have been denied or condemned as lunacy. 

While jogging at night, A sees a familiar figure at the city’s desolate fringes and realizes nothing ends, nothing is over. So begins a breathless, desperate attempt to hunt down and escape the past across the ravaged city of Turku, into the water-damaged classrooms of the 1990s and a darkness for which there are no words but still must be expressed. Destruction asks how one can write about oneself if one’s own self has been shattered. How can we document the horrors of one’s childhood in a culture where adults hate children and want to erase the traces of past wrongs?

Photo of the cover of "Hävitys"

Agent / Rights Director

urpu@helsinkiagency.fi
Urpu Strellman

Publishing House