A mother’s love is boundless, wild, and beautiful. I will honor my mother’s memory and continue to strive for the same goals she did. But my path will be different from the one she took. While she chose submission, I choose to fight. Where she chose gentleness, I choose determination. Slowly, I turn around and go back to the living room. I have a lot to think about before I go home. A lot to plan. I sit down on the sofa, the side where your mother was sitting. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the presence of her story. It gives me both solace and strength. I know that I can make it through this. If she could, I can.
I picture Smilla, hear her infectious laughter ringing in my ears. Sometime, many years from now, maybe we’ll sit down and talk. A mother and her grown daughter. Then I’ll tell her about my path through life, about the lessons I’ve learned. I don’t yet know exactly what I’ll say. But I do know where I’ll begin. I know what the first sentence of my story will be:
A good mother is not shaped by circumstances. She is the one who decides how to shape them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to my diligent publisher, my insightful first readers, my wonderful friends, and my whole supportive and loving family.
Last but not least, I thank you for reading my book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caroline Eriksson holds a master’s degree in social psychology and worked for more than ten years in human-resource management before deciding to pursue writing, her childhood dream. Her first two novels are based on historical Swedish murder cases, and her debut, The Devil Helped Me, was nominated for Stora Ljudbokspriset (the Big Audiobook Prize) in 2014.
Caroline has lived all over the world. She attended high school in Quantico, Virginia; studied at the University of Adelaide in Australia; and now lives in Stockholm. She denies being a daredevil but admits that she once threw herself off a mountain in New Zealand in a hang-gliding experiment.
Her greatest adventure today is raising her two children, and she satisfies any residual wanderlust by exploring the most terrifying parts of life—its dark psychological elements—in her writing. The Missing is Caroline’s first psychological suspense thriller and her first book translated into English. She’s already hard at work on her next novel.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Tiina Nunnally has translated over sixty works of fiction from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The Swedish Academy has honored her for her contributions to “the introduction of Swedish culture abroad.” And she was appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her efforts on behalf of Norwegian literature in the United States. Nunnally makes her living as a full-time literary translator.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Caroline Eriksson
Translation copyright © 2017 Tiina Nunnally
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as De försvunna by Bonnier in 2015 in Sweden. Translated from Swedish by Tiina Nunnally. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503940659
ISBN-10: 1503940659
Cover design by David Drummond