Fiction | Joonatan Tola Soon out in Czech

Crazy Lovely Birds

(Hullut ihanat linnut)

220 pages| First published in Finnish by Otava 2023

After Mikko’s death, Joonatan’s mother falls into a depression and his ten-year-old sister starts to run the household. The children sell their father’s weapons to make ends meet.

But one day, the social services show up at the door. Six-year-old Joonatan lifts his mother out of the bath, helps her get dressed and lights her cigarette. If his mother doesn’t find a new husband, she could lose custody of her children.

After an unfortunate experience with a casino addict as fiancé, the family is admitted to a care institution. While their mother becomes more and more closed in, the siblings grow up to become intelligent and resourceful yet lonely.

Just as in Tola’s acclaimed debut novel, the tragic of this stunning bildungsroman is balanced with the unique brilliance of Tola’s dark humour.

The Red Planet

(Punainen planeetta)

344 pages| First published in Finnish by Otava 2021

Joonatan gets a call from North Karelia: his grandmother is about to die. When he visits her, she believes he is Mikko, his father. Joonatan reminds her that his father is dead and asks what she remembers of him, but she doesn’t want to share. So Joonatan starts to research his father and writes his own, extraordinary story. He writes about his grandfather who worked harder than anyone, even when he was completely paralysed but for two fingers. Most of all, he writes about his father, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager, but managed to have a family and strove to become a recognised artist.

The result is a carnivalesque story that pulsates with life and at the same time shakes the soul with its tragic.

JOONATAN TOLA (b. 1983) has a Master of Arts in Finnish Language and is writing a PhD at the University of Helsinki. His hobbies are playing the piano, which he learned by himself, playing chess and dérive, i.e., wandering aimlessly. He lives with his family in Joensuu in the city garden area.

“There wasn’t born a more interesting man than my father on the whole planet.”

The Heart (Hjärtat)

152 pages | First published in Swedish by Förlaget M 2019

The winner of Swedish LiteratureYLE Prize 2019

MALIN KIVELÄ (b. 1974) has written novels, children’s books and plays, and her writing has been published in several languages, also in Vogue Italia. She received the Swedish YLE Literature Prize in 2013 for her novel Annanstans. Kivelä has studied journalism and theater. Her special interests include space, television series and dance.