Norma

One

If everything goes well, by August we can sit back and enjoy good food, sleep, and spa treatments. We can raise a glass to a future in which you receive everything you've never dared to dream. Then my work will be done, and I won't regret the price of your new life one bit.

After the funeral, nothing went back to the way it had been. As Norma fell behind the other guests and slipped onto the road leading to the cemetery gates, she still tried to make herself believe it was possible, though. Her mother wouldn't have been offended that she'd already ordered a taxi, and Norma didn't care about any of the rest of it: relatives she hardly knew, scheming heirs, the fate of the ancestral home of the Naakka family, which was sure to come up over the Karelian pasties and savory sandwich cake as her grandmother interjected observations spun from her brittle memory. Norma would leave the farce behind to try to return to normal life and meet her mother's death head-on. No more avoiding places that reminded Norma of her. No more being late to work. No more taking taxis instead of the metro, and no more bursting into tears each morning as she tore at her hair with a metal-toothed comb. She wouldn't forget to eat or drink enough, and she wouldn't let the life she and her mother had spent so much work building together fall apart. She would prepare for her workday the next morning just as before: she would pick the lint from the back of her blouse and pack her purse with baby oil to tame her curls, diazepam and meclizine to calm her mind and body. Into the bottom of the bag she would toss a travel-size bottle of Elnett hair spray because that was the smell of a normal workday, the choice of women who had their lives in order. That was the kind of woman she intended to be.

After armoring herself for the day to come, she would enter the Sörnäinen Metro Station, melt into the flowing mass of humanity, and allow the escalator to carry her to the platform as on any other

SOFI OKSANEN is a Finnish-Estonian novelist and playwright. She has received numerous prizes for her work, including the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, the Prix Femina, the Budapest Grand Prize, the European Book Prize, and the Nordic Council Literature Prize. She lives in Helsinki. Translated from the Finnish by Owen Witesman.

International Praise

"The reading experience is pure pleasure . . . Norma is not only the story of a young woman and her identity, both perched on the outskirts of the ordinary, but also a suspenseful mystery." -Turun Sanomat (Finland)

"Sofi Oksanen is one of the brightest shining stars in Nordic literature . . . I want to devour Norma whole-and at the same time pause to make it last longer. Oksanen is simply fantastic, and here she is at her best." -Norrköpings Tidningar (Sweden)

"True to herself, Oksanen denounces a globalization that turns human beings into merchandise . . . A hair-raising novel." -Livres Hebdo (France)

"A peculiar and disturbing novel that evokes the universe of filmmaker David Cronenberg . . . Norma impresses as much as it sends shivers down our spines." -Lire (France)

"Norma is an urgent story of beauty ideals, fertility, and women's vulnerability to exploitation . . . There is something tough and inexorable about Sofi Oksanen: she grabs the reader and demands we listen." -VLT (Sweden)

"Hold on tight, because this is the best novel you will read this fall." ★★★★★★ -Femina (Denmark)