I Will Never Know if She Hears
A little girl is taken into a new home because her mother is dying. She is separated from her family and grows up with her aunt and uncle. As an adult she now tries to write, to re-conquer her own lost history and that of her family. But how can you tell the story when there are hardly any memories left, and there are no documents either?
It is the story of her mother, Estrid, who moves from the university city of Lund to a small village in the northern forest regions where she will work as a schoolmistress. It’s about her meeting with a farmer’s son Johan who is marked with tuberculosis and not really keen on taking over the farm in the way expected of him. And the children they have. About the illness, the breast cancer, which gradually takes over and changes their lives completely. It is also the story of the girl and about her older siblings, the ones who got to stay on at the farm while she herself was fostered out.
I will Never Know If She Hears is a moving story about when something is sorely missed. It is about the longing to be a part of a story, a whole, and how the lack of it can mark all of your life.
Kerstin Norborg was born in 1961, grew up in southern Sweden, and now lives in Stockholm. She teaches Creative Writing and has previously worked as a journalist and a theatre musician. Norborg launched her literary career as a poet with Vakenlandet (1994) and published her first novel My Father’s House in 2001 – a book that was also shortlisted…
Read more
About the book
A little girl is taken into a new home because her mother is dying. She is separated from her family and grows up with her aunt and uncle. As an adult she now tries to write, to re-conquer her own lost history and that of her family. But how can you tell the story when there are hardly any memories left, and there are no documents either?
It is the story of her mother, Estrid, who moves from the university city of Lund to a small village in the northern forest regions where she will work as a schoolmistress. It’s about her meeting with a farmer’s son Johan who is marked with tuberculosis and not really keen on taking over the farm in the way expected of him. And the children they have. About the illness, the breast cancer, which gradually takes over and changes their lives completely. It is also the story of the girl and about her older siblings, the ones who got to stay on at the farm while she herself was fostered out.
I will Never Know If She Hears is a moving story about when something is sorely missed. It is about the longing to be a part of a story, a whole, and how the lack of it can mark all of your life.
