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Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto (Paperback)
Short Description for Your Presence is Requested at SuvantoIn a remote, piney wood in Finland stands a convalescent hospital called Suvanto, a concrete example of austere Scandinavian design. It is the 1920s, and the patients, all women, seek relief from ailments real and imagined. On the lower floors are the stoic Finnish women, and on the upper floors are foreign women of privilege - the 'up-patients'.
Full description- Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
- Published: 05 August 2010
- Format: Paperback 272 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Contemporary Fiction
- ISBN 13: 9780224090421 ISBN 10: 0224090429
- Sales rank: 526,841
Other books
Full description for Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto
In a remote, piney wood in Finland stands a convalescent hospital called Suvanto, a curving concrete example of austere Scandinavian design. It is the 1920s, and the patients, all women, seek relief from ailments real and imagined. On the lower floors are the stoic Finnish women; on the upper floors are foreign women of privilege - the 'up-patients'. They are tended to by head nurse Sunny Taylor, an American who has fled an ill-starred life only to retreat behind a mask of crisp professionalism. On a late-summer day a new patient arrives on Sunny's ward - a faded, irascible former ballroom-dance instructor named Julia Dey. Sunny takes it upon herself to pierce the mystery of Julia's reserve. Soon, Julia's difficulty, her tightly coiled anger, places her at the centre of the ward's tangled emotional life. As summer turns to autumn, and autumn to a long, dark winter, the patients hear rumours about changes being implemented at Suvanto by an American obstetrician, Dr. Peter Weber, who is experimenting with a new surgical stitch. Their familiar routine threatened, the women are not happy (they were not happy before), and the story's escalating menace builds to a terrifying conclusion.
