Quicksand

Quicksand

Giolito

2016-07-07

"A mass shooting has taken place at a prep school in Stockholm’s wealthiest suburb. Maja Norberg is eighteen years old and on trial for her involvement in the massacre where a number of people were killed, including her boyfriend and her best friend. When the novel opens, Maja has spent nine excruciating months in jail awaiting trial. Now the time has come for her to enter the courtroom. But how did Maja, the good girl next door who was popular and excelled at school, become the most hated teenager in the country? What did Maja do? Or is it what she didn’t do that brought her here?

As the trial proceeds, we flash back to the months leading up to the school shooting and learn about the turning point in Maja’s life: falling in love with Sebastian Fagerman, the son of Sweden’s richest business tycoon. Sebastian is dazzling but dangerous and Maja is drawn to him like a moth to a flame. As her relationship with Sebastian takes over her life, Maja increasingly loses touch with her parents and friends who fail to hear her silent calls for help.

Behind an affluent community’s slick façade, racial and class tensions are rife, drugs proliferate, and adults are absent. As a young girl loses her footing, the adult world fails one of its promised daughters, and each and every one of us is quick to throw the first stone. Is Maja a cold-blooded murderer or is she just a girl who has lost her way, and now has also lost the ones she loved?

The trial serves as a suspenseful framework for this gut-wrenching coming of age story that is utterly impossible to put down and in which we see the world entirely through Maja’s eyes. Her voice is quirky, snarky and wholly unique – we don’t always love Maja, but we love to be inside her head. In Maja Norberg, Malin Persson Giolito has created a darker Hazel Lancaster, a millennial Holden Caulfield, a young woman we both admire and despise and whose distinct voice and tragic circumstances are reminiscent of Ani in Luckiest Girl Alive."

Summary from literary agency Ahlander Agency: 

http://ahlanderagency.com/books/quicksand/

Wahlström and Widstrand

Reader reviews of Quicksand on Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30724110-quicksand?from_search=true&qid=RQMid3tJko&rank=1

Bildungsromans,
Legal stories,
Psychological fiction

Book

Book

Swedish, translated to English by Rachel Willson-Broyles.

Quicksand