The Year of the Bull

Prize-winning author Parland narrates events of a tumultuous 1918, between WWI and the Russian Revolution, from the viewpoint of six-year-old Riki in this strong intensely imaginative novel. Barricaded on a Finnish farm in a lovely, ghost-haunted countryside, along with parents, aunts, uncles and godlike Grandmother - whose thundered warnings from vengeful biblical texts create a frightening childhood mythology - Riki confuses Baal, devourer of children, with Bull, the lordly animal who bellows and rampages in a nearby field. Parland suggests the wartime brutality through Bull and the deaths of helpless creatures."" - Publishers Weekly.