Description
Elegant, slippery, and provocative, Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish author Hanna Johansson — a story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo.
Antiquity follows its unnamed narrator, a lonely woman in her thirties who becomes enamoured of a chic older artist, Helena, after interviewing her for a magazine. Helena invites the narrator to join her in the Greek city of Ermoupoli where she summers with her teenage daughter Olga. At first an object of jealousy, Olga morphs into an object of desire as the pull of Helena is transposed onto her daughter and the prospect of becoming someone’s first, if perverse, lover.
With echoes of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, The Lover, and Lolita, but wholly original and contemporary, Antiquity probes the depths of memory, power, and the narratives that arrange our experience of the world.
- Saturated with the sights, sounds, and tastes of Ermoupoli and loaded with simmering tensions, Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity is a suggestive exploration of desire, power, and the endless shifts of memory.
- For readers of Hot Milk, Call Me By Your Name, and The Lemon Grove we will be pitching for the International Booker, Warwick Prize, and pitching for summer read slots.