A riveting, funny coming-of-age story- the second volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogy Teenaged Pirkko can't decide which she hates most- God, her communist father, or her growing breasts. Grandpa has moved into the room long promised to her, and Mother, overworked and distant, tries to keep the peace between her headstrong daughter and husband. It's 1960s Finland and Pirkko has fun getting into trouble. That is, until her teacher suggests she might have what it takes to be a real writer. Then the historic summer of 1968 arrives, which Pirkko spends working at a Swiss orphanage where no one understands her and, as much as her family drive her mad, she's homesick for the first time. As the world shifts and swirls around her, Pirkko must make sense of it all - including her own sexual identity. A funny, unique coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a life lived in language, Backlight is the second volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogy.

Details

ISBN13: 9780241730072
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 272
Edition:
Publication Date: 05 May 2026
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 21.5(H)x13.6(L)x2.1(W)282
Weight (gm): 282

Author Biography

Pirkko Saisio (Author) Pirkko Saisio (born 1949) is one of Finland's most celebrated writers as well as an actor and theatre director. The author of numerous novels, plays and scripts for film and television, Saisio has been nominated for the Finlandia Prize seven times, winning it in 2003. She has, among other awards, received the Aleksis Kivi Prize and the State Literature Award. Backlight is the second volume in her Helsinki trilogy, preceded by Lowest Common Denominator and followed by The Red Book of Farewells. Mia Spangenberg (Translator) Mia Spangenberg translates from Finnish, Swedish and German. She is the winner of the Nadia Christensen Prize for her translation of Lowest Common Denominator.

Reviews

A Finnish masterpiece of autofiction... Saisio's Helsinki trilogy is a dreamy, complex and therefore so very human portrait of the formation of a great artist * Financial Times *
Entirely irreverent, witty and impressionistic. Saisio's gift is to render this autobiographical history as freshly as if it happened yesterday ... a seminal work of Nordic artistry * Irish Times *
This is both family history and contemporary political history, sexual self-discovery and artist biography… moving and clever, funny and beautiful * NZZ am Sonntag, Best Books of the Century *
Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio’s work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen -- Niina Pollari * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Like Annie Ernaux but funny -- Irène Bluche * rbbKultur *