Hanna's Daughters
A Novel
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4.1 • 8 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“An uplifting family saga . . . [Marianne] Fredriksson provides a satisfyingly complex . . . chronicle of women and the burdens imposed by their family history, their gender and themselves. . . . Its message of reconciliation is transcendent.”—People
Sweeping through one hundred years of Scandinavian history, this luminous story follows three generations of Swedish women—a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—whose lives are linked through a century of great love and great loss. Resonating with truth and revelation, this moving novel deftly explores the often difficult but enduring ties between mothers and daughters, the sacrifices, compromises, and rewards in the relationships between men and women, and the patterns of emotion that repeat themselves through generations. If you have ever wanted to connect with the past, or rediscover family, Hanna's Daughters will strike a chord in your heart. . . .
Praise for Hanna's Daughters
“Brilliant . . . Hanna's Daughters outlines the lives of three generations of women and their complicated relationships with one another.”—USA Today
“I loved Hanna's Daughters from the very first page, and I absolutely could not put it down. . . . Written with grace and wit, this novel deserves to be read, discussed, and cherished by future generations of mothers and daughters.”—Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People and Errands
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A chronicle of emotional and psychological exploration, this family saga, a bestseller in Fredriksson's native Sweden and in Germany, is an unerringly perceptive portrait of women in the flux of Scandinavian history. In this English translation, however, it gets off to a slow start, hobbled by spare prose and often stiff dialogue. But once the characters acquire identity, the novel begins to reverberate in the reader's mind. Set against the backdrop of the 1870s Swedish-Norwegian Union crisis and WWII, the plot skillfully interweaves the stories of three generations of women. Born in 1871, grandmother Hanna Broman is a woman of "sense and continuity," but her life is blighted when she is raped and impregnated by a cousin at the age of 12. Marriage to miller John Broman restores her honor and produces three additional children: Johanna and--interestingly, given the title--two more sons. As she matures, atheist-socialist Johanna is contemptuous of her mother, whose life has been so deprived that she must learn about mirrors, indoor plumbing and electricity. Johanna's daughter, Anna, is a writer living in the concrete suburbs, hungering to understand her antecedents. Ultimately, Anna acknowledges that she cannot find "a way home" in her research about her family; instead, she discovers that everything about them is "full of contradictions." As a result, this is a book that benefits from two readings because its patterns often are built on characters with identical names or similar personalities, many events are captured in disconnected vignettes and chronologies jump and overlap. Yet the unsentimental depictions of women's inner lives, of the resentment and bitterness that undermine many family relationships and of the harsh truths that can never be spoken, create a portrait of the human need to connect and of the spiritual isolation that often occurs in the absence of such connection. Rights sold in 27 countries; simultaneous publication in fall 1998 in U.S., U.K., Australia, Greece, France, Poland, Iceland, Japan, Brazil, Israel, Korea, Czech Republic; film rights to Bavaria Film in Munich; major ad/promo.
