Things that Fall from the Sky

Starred review from May 1, 2019
Finnish writer Ahava's European Union Prize-winning 2015 novel, now her first to be published in English, is a whimsical and thoughtful rumination on the terrifying randomness that dictates the course of a life. The novel opens with the voice of Saara, a young girl who loses her mother in an unusual tragedy and whose aunt lives in a nineteenth century manor house surrounded by sheep and filled with hospital beds. Ahava's rendering of Saara recalls the first-person intimacy of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and serves as an example of what strong writers can do with simple sentences. Saara's aunt, who has won the lottery twice, grapples with her unnatural luck by entering into correspondence with a man struck by lightning four times, attempting to understand their shared unnatural fortune. Interwoven with elements of fairy tales, the novel is honest about its lack of a traditional ending, but no less touching for it. While this beautiful translation by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah was worth the wait, here's hoping it won't be long before English-language readers can access more of Ahava's remarkable fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)