Quỳnh Tran - Shade and Breeze

Translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson

Má dreams of wealth and grandeur, Hieu dreams of Finnish girls. The younger brother, always on the periphery, always an observer, gradually disappears into his schoolwork, mesmerised by his own intellect.

The three of them form a solitary world in a small Ostrobothnian town on the west coast of Finland. Má and Hieu, constantly on a collision course with each other and the community’s suffocating social codes. They live among people who want to talk openly about everything, who don’t understand the necessity of sometimes remaining in the shade. 

In sensitive and transfixing prose that has the effect of a series of tableaux, and with chapter headings reminiscent of the intertitles in a silent film, Tran’s multi-award-winning debut is a moving story about love, the compulsion to create, and the meaning of family.

QUYNH TRAN (b. 1989) grew up in Jakobstad in Finnish Ostrobothnia and now resides in Malmö. A graduate of the acclaimed Biskops Arnö Writing School, Tran’s debut novel Shade and Breeze was awarded the prestigious Runeberg Prize, the Svenska Yle’s Literature Prize, and the Borås Tidning’s Debutant Prize.

KIRA JOSEFSSON is a writer, editor, and translator working between Swedish and English. Her work has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize. She lives in Queens, New York, and regularly writes on US events and politics in the Swedish press.