A brilliant and unnerving debut novel about the mysteriously ill patients at a remote hospital in Finland
In a remote, piney wood in Finland stands a convalescent hospital called Suvanto, a curving concrete example of austere Scandinavian design. It is the 1920s, and the patients, all
women, seek relief from ailments real and imagined. On the lower floors are the stoic Finnish women; on the upper floors are foreign women of privilege—the “up-patients.” They are tended to
by head nurse Sunny Taylor, an American who has fled an ill-starred life only to retreat behind a mask of crisp professionalism. On a late-summer day a new patient arrives on Sunny’s ward—
a faded, irascible former ballroom-dance instructor named Julia Dey. Sunny takes it upon herself to pierce the mystery of Julia’s reserve. Soon, Julia’s difficulty, her tightly coiled
anger, places her at the center of the ward’s tangled emotional life. This fraught dynamic animates Maile Chapman’s ambitious first novel. As summer turns to fall, and fall to a long, dark
winter, the patients hear rumors about changes being implemented at Suvanto by an American obstetrician, Dr. Peter Weber, who is experimenting with a new surgical stitch. Their familiar
routine threatened, the women are not happy (they were not happy before), and the story’s escalating menace builds to a terrifying conclusion.
