Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A remote farm in Sweden is the setting for a take of confusion, lies and horror. Just what went on inside that small house?
The Farm
What you need to know before your trail
Daniel believes that his parents are enjoying their retirement on a remote farm in Sweden, where his mother is from. But then the phone rings.
His father tells him that his mother is mentally ill and has been imagining horrible things and has now been committed to a mental hospital.
Horrified, Daniel gets ready to fly out to Sweden. But then his mother calls: Everything that man has told you is a lie. I’m not mad…I need the police…Meet me at Heathrow, she says.
Two parents. One of them is lying. But who and why?
Travel Guide
A remote farmhouse in the very south of Sweden over an hour’s drive from Gothenburg. Dark nights, cold days and a woman committed to a mental institution. Who is telling the truth?
Who is lying?
Well quite the premise! Interesting that as in the book, Tom himself has a Swedish mother and English father and in an interview has explained that his mother’s own psychotic episode inspired the novel, then this is even a more powerful premise than first thought.
This sleepy rural community is hiding something but what? the confusion blankets the entire landscape.
“I’m sure your father has spoken to you. Everything that man has told you is a lie. I’m not mad.”
But Sweden and the small rural community they end up in might not be the most welcoming of places. They moved here to retire –
“Moving to Sweden was a change of lifestyle not a means of survival”
But it soon becomes a battle of survival and a battle of wills as in the remote Swedish landscape, no one can hear you scream-
“It was remote and beautiful. The nearest town was twenty kilometers away. As a child, the sound of a passing car was unusual enough to bring me outside.
The forests, lakes and field were the only landscape I knew.”
The woods all around bring fear and stories of something lurking,watching and waiting. The community as well as the landscape is remote, claustrophobic and utterly chilling. What is myth and what is reality and is that level of isolation and introspection ever really good for the mind?
Where Next?
