Flowering Nettles

Harry Martinson

FLOWERING NETTLES is commonly regarded as Harry Martinson’s masterpiece of prose and is, still today, an exceptionally upsetting reading experience. The story of the parish boy Martin Tomasson and his fate as a child onon the farms where he is accommodated has a miraculous balance even when his loneliness seems abysmal. Martin loses pretty much all the people who mean anything to him. But if FLOWERING NETTLES embodies an almost inconceivable abandonment, it equally convincingly depicts a stubborn and indomitable will to survive, and an ability to, after all, seek the light in life.