Wonderland (Underlandet)

SHORTLISTED for VI:s Literature Prize
SHORTLISTED for Eyvind Johnson Prize
Wonderland is a spellbinding study of the many faces of deception: a novel that, with crystal-clear prose, depicts a chameleon-like existence where truth and lies are never easily separated. It follows three different characters, wandering an ominous contemporary world saturated with abandonment and false mirrors. On the Pacific Coast, a homeless woman travels between cities and towns pretending to be a child. At a hotel in Athens, two rival Catalan journalists become entangled in a risky game of fact and fiction. And in a luxury villa in Southern Sweden, a housewife chooses to lie at the expense of others in order to maintain the only life she can tolerate living. Around them appears a hall of mirrors inhabited by a range of unreliable characters: bluffing children, doped up martial artists, ghostwriters, dishonest politicians, eco-criminals, and fashionable jetsetters so disfigured by plastic surgery that there seems to be nothing left of their original selves. All of them individuals trying to find their way in that slippery world of post-truth that we've gotten to know as our own.
"The best book in Swedish this year."
- Borås Tidning
"Nordenhök is a masterful illustrator of the moment when self-deception begins to crack. /… / In Wonderland, Hanna Nordenhök destroys the notion that there is such a thing as an authentic self. It is an astonishing novel.”
- Aftonbladet
"Hanna Nordenhök’s kaleidoscopical novel is a merciless reckoning with the obsession with surface, appearance and success of our times. Penned in a spellbinding prose, populated with characters trapped in an eternal dusk of loss and brokenness, Wonderland grows into a nightmarish descent into the claustrophobic labyrinths of our lies and falsehoods."
- Johannes Anyuru, author of They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears
“A women pretending to be a child. A journalist about to reveal a colleague fraudster. A wife that looks away. When Nordenhök abandons earlier work’s historical archives in order to let fiction run amok around the nature of fraud and a mendacious contemporary world, the result is as sparklingly sharp as it is riveting.”
- Dagens Nyheter
“What Hanna Nordenhök presents instead of auto-fiction – the literary dominant – are human beings who have become auto-fictive versions of themselves. Who embrace their roles so faithfully that their public personas have gotten caught up in the private skin /… / But the isolation between humans – recognizable from her authorship – paradoxically evokes something authentic within the reader. A moral, a conscience. One leans inwards toward the sinister text. It is elegantly executed, a slap on the wrist. As a reader I become filthily exhilarated when this subtle squalor awakens me. An extraordinary literary trick mirror.”
- Expressen
"Hanna Nordenhök has crafted a brilliant psychological thriller out of human lies. The prose is poised and is just as comfortable no matter where in the world it takes place. I recommend this book as an ideal title for every book club. Masterful literature and psychological depth. It must be discussed."
- Norrköpings-Tidningar
"I have reviewed a huge number of books. At long intervals I sometimes feel: Here it is. What I’m looking for. A book that, much like a chiropractor, cracks my spine and enhances my visual acuity. Wonderland is such a book."
- Göteborgs-Posten
"Hanna Nordenhök writes a unique, poetic prose /.../ The skies and lights shifts are ominous premonitions. Merciless violence breaks out from a scenery at the same time beautiful and grimy, like a cheap off-season tourist hotel. Just as impossible it is to resist the desire to unmask a fraudster it is to try to resist Nordenhök's ingenious depiction of this assembly of freaks, all of them distorted characters captured in their own lies."
- Sydsvenskan
"There are theories claiming that those who are determined to unmask a fraudster inevitably tend to become one with the bluff they're set to unveil", says a provocateur in Wonderland. It's a sordid and glimmering theory, sensational in it's way of turning everything upside down, of transforming the hero into villain with the smallest shift of thought. That way, it also becomes a miniature portrayal of Hanna Nordenhök's fantastic novel as a whole.
- ETC Magazine
"It isn't an appealing image of our contemporary world Hanna Nordenhök depicts. Endlessly echoing loneliness is spreading in society and the feeling of apocalypse is strong: the threats are no longer possible to ignore. Mortals wander a world where false gospels are many and who to trust is hard to know. /.../ Nordenhök's seriousness and her wonderful, poetic prose makes this a thought-provoking book about our own times that you simply can't put down."
- VI Magazine
"In Wonderland, three life stories are woven together with short stories (referred to as case studies) around the novel’s overarching theme of betrayal and the effects of unwanted isolation. /.../ The author constructs and weaves her various stories like a television series where the episodes are provided with cliffhangers to maintain the tension throughout the drama. The intrigues are therefore portrayed in scenes consistently reproduced with what has become Nordenhök’s signa-ture: a filmic gaze, quietly mood-creating and seductively beautifully crafted prose.
- BTJ Review