Thinner Than Water

A mesmerizing literary break-through about family ties, generational trauma, secrets we keep and lies we tell ourselves.

A father, daughter and niece go to Berlin for four days, ostensibly to visit the memorial stolperstein that bears their last name. However, it’ll turn out that all three have ulterior motives for their trip, and secrets brewing beneath the surface…

Mats has decided to donate his mother’s letters from WWII to the Jewish Museum, and wants to make use of the intimacy of the trip to let his daughter Evi know that he is divorcing her mother. As a buffer he’s invited his niece Sara to come along, hoping that this will ease the pain as the two girls have always had a strong bond.

Sara has her own reasons for visiting Berlin, as there is someone there she longs to meet. Her life has recently seemed like a prison of her own making, and she is desperately looking for a way out. Meanwhile, Evi does not agree with her father’s decision to give their grandmother’s letters away, and has her own plans for them.

This is a story that both spans over four days and hundreds of years, as we simultaneously travel back into the family’s history from the small town of Pyritz, to Berlin and further on to Sweden, setting their personal family history in the grander historical context.

With uncanny precision and unwavering empathy, Anna Brynhildsen depicts a family in crisis, reminiscent of Tessa Hadley’s works, as she charts the complicated ties that bind the trio together. She deftly navigates between the ubiquitous human experience of previous generations’ decisions affecting the life of today, and the specifics of the Jewish family experience, and in doing so does for Swedish literature what Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am did in the US.