A terrifying & dream-like new novel from one of our greatest contemporary writers. At a critical point in her career painter Angelika Rossdal suddenly moves to Kvaloya a small island deep in the Arctic Circle to dedicate herself to the solitary pursuit of her craft. With her she brings her young daughter Liv who grows up isolated & unable or unwilling to make friends her own age spending much of her time alone or with an elderly neighbour Kyrre Jonsson who beguiles her with old folk tales & stories about trolls mermaids & -- crucially for the events that unfold in the summer of her eighteenth year -- about the huldra " a wild spirit who appears in the form of an irresistibly beautiful girl to lure young men to their doom. Now twenty-eight Liv looks back on her life & particularly to that summer when two boys drowned under mysterious circumstances in the still moonlit waters off the shores of Kvaloya. Were the deaths accidental or were the boys as Kyrre believes lured to their deaths by a malevolent spirit? To begin with Liv dismisses the old mans stories as fantasy but as the summer continues & events take an even darker turn she comes to believe that something supernatural is happening on the isl&. But is it? Or is Liv a lonely girl who has spent her entire life in the shadow of her beautiful gifted mother slowly beginning to lose touch with reality? Set in the white nights of an Arctic summer the novel has the heightened hallucinogenic atmosphere of a dream but culminates in a moment of profound horror. Intensely imagined & exquisitely written A Summer of Drowning""is a play of dark & light of looking & seeing that will hold & haunt every reader. " From the Hardcover edition.""