by John Boyne
Part of The Elements
First published 2024
Freya has built a life that looks, from the outside, like success. She works as a surgeon specializing in skin grafts, owns a flat in one of the city's most desirable developments, and drives the kind of car that turns heads. She sets her own rules. Nobody gets too close. But the surface is a construction. Something happened to Freya during one summer when she was young, and she has spent every year since moving away from it, or toward it, depending on how you look at these things. John Boyne follows Freya across both timelines, the child she was and the woman she became, pressing on the question that sits at the center of the story: did that summer create her, or did it simply reveal her? Was the cruelty already there, waiting? The skin graft surgeon who repairs other people's damage while carrying her own is not an accident of detail. Boyne wants you to sit with the discomfort of not knowing whether Freya deserves your sympathy or your fear, and by the end, you will have earned an answer you may not have wanted.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, contemporary, adult-fiction, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, intimate, introspective, morally-ambiguous, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: character-study, dual-timeline, past-haunting-present, unreliable-narrator
Setting: city
176 pages · Hardcover · Doubleday
Content warnings: abuse