The Underground Library

A woman wanders through a desolate landscape in the near future alongside other survivors of an unnamed catastrophe. She must reach someone she loves but is prevented from doing so by internal and external forces seemingly beyond her control. Along the way, she meets two children, to whom she becomes bound as if by invisible threads. Together, they must survive in an increasingly nightmarish and treacherous terrain.

Hanna Nordenhök’s new book is a novel about grief and human trials, yet at the same time a dazzlingly beautiful portrayal of love and belonging in a time of extreme crisis.

“She cast a quick glance over her shoulder into the night without lowering the knife. The birds had fallen silent with the onset of darkness, but she thought she could still hear the sound of their chaotic flapping and thousands of pecking beaks. She shone her light into the shed again. Then she reached out her hand toward the boy.”

Praise for The Underground Library:

"A gritty, horror-movie-esque yet deeply moving road trip about saving the unsavable.”
— Dagens Nyheter

"Hanna Nordenhök’s new novel, The Underground Library, is neither a thriller nor a crime novel, but it is certainly enthralling. (...) As ever, it is superbly written. Hanna Nordenhök simply cannot stop being a poet, even though she has long since chosen to write prose: it is precise and sensual, penned with an unimpaired sense of the nuances of words and the rhythm of language."
— Sydsvenskan
                                                              
"Chapter by chapter, we are transported back in time. It ought to be impossible to write this kind of dystopia in such a way, but Nordenhök masters it fully. She keeps a tight grip on the narrative and dispenses information with meticulous precision. The text is almost magnetic, drawing the reader in so that one races through the pages. (...) Had this been a TV series we would've been eagerly awaiting the next season. It’s been a long time since a novel captivated me the way The Underground Library does." 
— Expressen

"The opening scene of The Underground Library by Hanna Nordenhök sets the tone: it is a dark, evocative and post-apocalyptic novel about survival in a society that has collapsed following a catastrophic pandemic. The prose is poetic and rich in detail, with memories, dreams and the present merging together. (...) The Underground Library poignantly explores what it means to be human when everything is falling apart, and how stories can be the last thing keeping us clinging to life. It is a mournful book, yet one with glimmers of hope and human warmth. As a whole, it offers a profoundly existential reading experience." 
— BTJ
                              
"[In Nordenhök’s] hands, the Swedish language seems richer, more saturated, at times downright luminous. Low-intensity horror, revulsion, and unease, become an exquisite read. (...) And within this dense, dystopian world, there are also glimmers of hope – springing from what I wish or hope is something deeply human: affection, tenderness, a struggle for survival, and a desire to save one another." 
— Borås Tidning

"Sweden is in the grip of an epidemic disaster in Hanna Nordenhök’s new novel, The Underground Library. A disease that causes black, web-like patterns on the skin leaves only death and silence in its wake. (...) [Nordenhök allows] the surrounding natural world to embody and amplify emotional states. And she does so with such skill that few other Swedish authors can match her." 
— SR Kulturnytt
                                                                
"The novel begins with a kind of ending – the father’s death – which the events that follow can be said both to precede and to extend into the future, as if the ending were constantly taking place. The father is both dead and about to die. His daughter strives for something we know she will fail to achieve, whilst at the same time a rupture occurs within chronological time. On one level, nothing alters; on another, everything seems possible within the novel’s temporality. (...) [I] return to the protagonist of the deeply moving Caesaria, who has been forgotten or is hiding away on a dilapidated farmstead. In it, Nordenhök, as in her earlier novels, creates a somnambulistic cycle, a dreamlike style that oscillates between the evocative and the sleep-like."
— Aftonbladet
                                                                                      
"Ominous. That word tends to appear whenever Hanna Nordenhök is mentioned. In this new novel, the sense of foreboding lies in the rear-view mirror, whilst at the same time spreading like a mist across the landscape. (...) This is an atmospheric novel that draws its strength from its depictions of a future world, devoid of people and animals. It is profoundly dark. There are some painful, horrific scenes from what must be Kolmården Zoo, and the settings are sombre, moist, and bleached. There may be hope. The bridge to the continent looms in the distance and there are signs of life, perhaps, further south. But above all, there's the social interaction that we rely on even when our lives are at stake. That is what keeps us going and clinging to human life."
— Dagens Nyheter
                                                                                     
"[The] underground library is the father's flat, where the daughter grew up amidst pipe smoke and shabby stagnation. The recollection of the father is the eye of the thunderstorm of this novel. Outside, the infected world has been turned upside down. Human bodies lie in heaps. This while the course of the illness behave differently in animals – they survive, but become bloodthirsty, hunting across species boundaries in large groups (…) Amidst this lawlessness, the transgender boy remains, as an enigmatic symbol. The protagonist regards him with suspicion, as false, disguised, yet sees herself reflected in him precisely for that reason. Perhaps he is a boy, she thinks, ‘because that was what circumstances required of him, just as she herself has given herself a mission she cannot fully grasp’. Despite her incredulity, a strange alliance glimmers between them, a budding awareness of life-giving identities and how they are shaped, when civilisation, family ties, even names, are gone."
— Svenska Dagbladet
                                                                                                           
"In this short and gut-wrenching story, told in reverse, the landscape is eerie and silent, the animals behave strangely, whilst the novel’s small group of left-behind-individuals struggle to survive. A dystopian counterpart to Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road."
— Göteborgs-Posten