Eva Hegge - "Painted Fires"

"Painted Fires" is a gripping novel about friendship, fate, self-determination and IVF. With hypnotic prose and quiet humour, Eva Hegge tells the story of a woman who, in her search for a child, finds herself caught in an in-between world - and asks how we can break free from order and expectation.

Rebekka is in her mid-thirties, educated, and works as a sales assistant in a furniture shop. She is in a relationship, longs for a child that doesn't come, and wonders why this desire is so powerful and why it simply won't go away.

When her best friend Jenny becomes pregnant, a noose tightens around Rebekka's heart. She is overcome by the feeling that everything in her life is now falling into some fateful order. She sets off on an odyssey - through windowless doctors' offices, libraries, the places of her childhood and her friendship with Jenny, to a few nuns and into the enigmatic myths of a distant past.

Meanwhile, the river beneath her window keeps flowing lazily through the city, and somewhere in the mountains, a cave may hold an embryo made of ice.