“Astrid & Veronika”
by Linda Olsson
Published: February 2007
ISBN: 9780143038078

(Updated: November 23, 2007.)

From the Publisher…

With extraordinary emotional power, Linda Olsson’s stunningly well-crafted debut novel recounts the unusual and unexpected friendship that develops between two women. Veronika, a young writer from New Zealand, rents a house in a small Swedish village as she tries to come to terms with a recent tragedy while also finishing a novel. Her arrival is silently observed by Astrid, an older, reclusive neighbor who slowly becomes a presence in Veronika’s life, offering comfort in the form of companionship and lovingly prepared home-cooked meals. Set against a haunting Swedish landscape, Astrid & Veronika is a lyrical and meditative novel of love and loss, and a story that will remain with readers long after the characters’ secrets are revealed.

This is a book of gentle beauty. And… it showed me that there are books that you don’t want to fall asleep on for reasons other than wanting to find out what’s next.

This book is engaging of both mind and heart and it is the latter that made me want to stop reading before falling asleep in order to pick and choose a moment of the book to savour and bring into the night with me. Yes. That.

There is a comment on the dust jacket of the copy of this book that I have that says it “Evokes, with great beauty and precison, the landscape of a friendship.” Well… it does do this but it also offered me the ground over which to lay my own friendships. Minds judge. Hearts don’t. This book made me realize yet again and from my heart up to my mind, that sharing our significance with a friend who listens with her heart is, to me, the definition of friendship. Astrid & Veronika describes the beauty of this so gently that it is possible to close the loop of heart to mind and back to heart again in our own lives as well.

Very wonderful. A five out of five hearts in my rating.