Red Sun (Röd sol)

India and Kallas are invited to Kallas' childhood friend Desma and her big house by the sea. It is late summer and the heat is unbearable. Late one evening, three children appear, alone and with nowhere to go. Desma gives the children shelter for the night, but when a threatening fire breaks out in the mountains, they are forced to stay behind. Without ever wanting it, India and Kallas become attached to the children. They begin to indulge in the kind of love and care usually reserved for parents, in the shadow of the inevitable that keeps creeping closer.

Red Sun is a love story and a family tragedy, written with distinctive precision.

‘Red Sun navigates between the realistic novel, the fairy tale and the gothic horror’ – Svenska Dagbladet

‘One of this novel’s strongest qualities is how unpredictable it is (…) Reading it is similar to taking part in the reconstruction of a legal case, where crime has to do with parenthood and responsibility’ – Bjorn Kohlstrom, Bernur (acclaimed Swedish critic)

‘ Johanne Lykke Holm retains her stylistic uniqueness in Red Sun. It is serious, dense and dark – saturated with destiny’ – Dagens Nyheter

‘Written in a sensuous and saturated prose that few writers in this country have mastered as well as she has’ – Expressen

‘Johanne Lykke Holm/Naderehvandi writes with a language that can almost be touched. Black, sparkling and viscous, like a trickle of oil running over the white pages of the book’ – Gelfe Dagblad

‘Spotted for her strange and hypnotic first novel, STREGA (2022), Johanne Lykke Holm confirms her dazzling literary instincts with her second book, which is every bit as singular as her previous one’ - Telerama

‘Johanne Lykke Holm's prose oscillates between razor-sharp accuracy and disturbing dreaminess. Every sentence is chiselled, every description exudes a tension that is sometimes raw, sometimes lyrical. The author builds a universe where matter weighs on bodies, where the wind, the sea and the stone impose their own tempo. Red Sun is a bewitching and disconcerting novel based on uncertainty and the impossibility of escape. A work in which every sensation is an enigma, and in which the sumptuous language outlines the contours of a world suspended between dream and reality’. – Le Devoir

‘Moral quandaries exposed  in a lush language.’ – Buchkultur

‘Everything in this novel shimmers and glows.’ – SWR Reading Lists

‘Johanne Lykke Holm is an aesthete and the novel [...] impresses with its menacing mood and atmospheric narrative style.’ – SWR Kultur