©Otto Virtanen

Meri Valkama: Yours, Margot

Winner of the Debut of the the Year Prize 2021.

A fascinating debut novel about the fragility of memory and the power of silence, but also about the collapse of a nation as well as the right to feel nostalgic for a fallen society.

In the early 80’s, Markus Siltanen moves with his family to East Berlin as a foreign correspondent. When the family eventually returns to Finland, Vilja’s childhood memories begin to dissolve into nothingness. In 2011, after her father’s death, Vilja finds a bundle of letters from someone called Margot with whom her father had a passionate affair in Berlin. Vilja makes a decision to track Margot and returns to Berlin.
Meri Valkama approaches the crumbling of family ties, remembrance and forgetting, and the need to understand the past in order to move on.

Original title: Sinun, Margot. WSOY 2022, 556 pp.
Foreign rights: Bonnier Rights Finland, bonnierrights.fi