New Names

After the critically acclaimed Inlands, Elin Willows is back with a new novel about what most profoundly shapes us: the relationships we create, repair, and lose, in a constant flow.

The first great friendship in Stockholm is the starting point of everything. A confidant, and someone who opens the world. Via clothes, records, punk, and its sweaty heart-pounding community, the narrator takes her first steps towards adulthood. To breathe in rhythm, to be as one. Such closeness never ends. Or does it?

The narrator grows older, moves to London where there’s almost no loneliness, only the clubs’ dance floors and shared plates of fries. But sometimes, during the nights, the uncertainty forms into a downward spiral.

At the final stop of the novel, we find the narrator in Turku, Finland. A new adult life at the university is framed by routines. But the memories of past friendships are always there. Is it possible to start over?

In all these places, intense relationships with other women arise and the narrator is enveloped in a closeness where she is reflected and comes into being before her own gaze. There are boyfriends, jobs, parties and more. But it is in the crackling chemistry between girls and women that life develops.

Elin Willows tenderly and precisely captures the intense friendships that bring us to life, but which can also end abruptly. What is to be left of us, when the people we felt the closest to have become shadows? And how do we fit them into the story of our lives? Elin Willow’s laconic storytelling captures the indecisiveness of our time.