Christmas Oratorio (Verba Mundi)

The Christmas Oratio is a grand fresco of human strife, ambition, and desire by Sweden's foremost contemporary novelist. Centering on three generations of Nordensson men, it unravels a saga as elaborately structured as a Bach cantata and as emotionally complex as a Bergman film.

The Christmas Oratio begins in the 1930s, when Solveig Nordensson (wife of Aron and mother of Sidner) is accidentally killed. The grieving family abandons its home and moves to another town, hoping to start afresh, but finds that its emotional burdens have emigrated with it. Aron, bereft by the loss of his wife, starts "seeing" her in capricious hallucinations, and tragically seeks her reincarnation in a love-starved woman half a world away. The introverted Sidner begins a quest for emotional maturity that leads him into odd friendships with a remarkably self-reliant street boy and a free-spirited older woman. And Grandson Victor, heir to the tortured legacy left by Solveig's death, finds redemption for himself in a staging of Bach's Christmas Oratio - a performance begun by Solveig half a century earlier and interrupted by her tragic death.

More than a generational saga, The Christmas Oratio is one of those rare works that encompasses the entirety of the human drama in terms at once touching, comic, erotic, and surreal. This is a novel of phenomenal breadth and insight, and a stunning debut in English by one of the most celebrated authors in Scandinavia today.

"A wonderful novel, crammed with vivid and surprising incidents . . . Like Bach's great musical work, Tunström's 'Oratorio' offers a celebration of things that endure." Washington Times