Those weirder elements are also present almost from the very start, with the labelling of everything it’s implied that in the world of Amatka, naming things helps them or forces them to keep their form. Tidbeck sets us up to expect one kind of novel, very much in the mode of 1984, where love as resistance leads to a more generalised resistance against an unjust authority but Amatka goes in a different direction, with its weirder elements.

At the start, it seems like a fictionalised version of the Soviet Union with a dash of the Weird, with its intrusive government presence, communist and communal system, dismal dreariness, spartan tendencies, and general bureaucratic and depersonalising approach. So perhaps it is no surprise that Amatka is such a linguistically involved novel…Īmatka is on the surface of it a novel in the tradition of Ursula Le Guin mixed with a good dash of George Orwell The Dispossessed meets 1984. Karin Tidbeck first came to my attention through Cheeky Frawg’s publication of Jagganath a few years back it feels like even then we were all waiting for a novel by this multitalented multilinguist who translates her own fiction from Swedish into English, including this novel. Amatka is a beguiling and wholly original novel about freedom, love, and artistic creation by a captivating new voice. In Karin Tidbeck’s world, everyone is suspect, no one is safe, and nothing-not even language, nor the very fabric of reality-can be taken for granted. But when she stumbles on evidence of a growing threat to the colony, and a cover-up by its administration, she embarks on an investigation that puts her at tremendous risk. Intending to stay just a short while, Vanja falls in love with her housemate, Nina, and prolongs her visit. Immediately she feels that something strange is going on: people act oddly in Amatka, and citizens are monitored for signs of subversion.

Vanja, an information assistant, is sent from her home city of Essre to the austere, wintry colony of Amatka with an assignment to collect intelligence for the government.