I wasn’t sure what to expect from My Brother by Karin Smirnoff. Initially I found the lack of punctuation and the way in which the names ran into each other challenging. As such, it took me a while to settle into the book. I did eventually sync into the rhythm of this book.

Jana returns to her remote hometown, Smalangar, where with the exception of Jana no-one really ever leaves. Because of this, everyones lives appears to weave into everyone else’s and where people’s foibles are tolerated and even overlooked. Jana returns to stay in the old family home with her twin brother Bror. She finds a job and finds herself meeting up with people from her past through her work. It felt quite an understated book, exploring the lies and truths people and family tell themselves. How sometimes there’s a need to forget, sometimes to remember and also forgive.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, Pushkin Press, for making this ARC available to me to read for a fair and honest review and introducing me to Karin Smirnoff. I will definitely look out for her Millennium books.

3.5 rounded up

Jana Kippo sets off in a heavy snow storm to visit her twin brother Bror at the family home in Smalånger in Northern Sweden. She gets disorientated in the driving snow and loses her way but he’s helped by John with whom she later has a love affair. The past becomes very entangled and wrapped up with the present and what emerges a bit at a time is a dark and shocking tale in which Jana is forced to confront the truth about her horrifying past.

This is about as far from an easy read as you can get mostly because of the harrowing cruelty that is revealed which shocks to the core. Here we have hugely damaged people and it seems that some are fractured beyond healing. Jana and Bror are understandably on a course of self destruction but in different ways. They are not the only ones who are messed up by trauma in the past and so it’s a darkly unremitting twisted tale with violence, revenge and hatred that repeats on a loop.

Not only is the subject matter a very difficult one but the style is equally tricky to get into as there is little punctuation and words that run into each other. However, you do get used to it and the incendiary information bombs the author throws at us .

This harsh and strange tale is matched by the harsh far northern latitudes, with changeable weather conditions in a tough to live area. This makes the people equally tough and they sure are. They aren’t just survivors in an unremitting landscape, they are also secretive and you can’t altogether make sense of some actions or their lies but some of their fears are very understandable.

The ending is strange but I hope it is an optimistic sign as Jana and Bror deserve something good.

Overall, this has been a difficult book to read and it’s not for the faint of heart that’s for sure.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Pushkin Press for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.

My Brother, the first in the much-acclaimed Swedish trilogy by Karin Smirnoff, is a difficult book: difficult to read, difficult to rate, full of difficult-to-like characters and, once read, equally difficult to forget!

Jana Kippo comes back to her hometown in the rural north Sweden after being away for many years and, in a snowstorm that obscures the way to her childhood home, meets John Brannstrom who takes her to his place, an old house that she hazily remembers visiting in her distant past. While Jana is sure she is meeting John for the first time, the man seems to know an uncomfortable lot about her. Come next morning, Jana arrives at her destination to find the homestead, including her twin brother Bror who is swiftly drinking himself towards an untimely death, literally gone to seed. Initially uncertain of how long she intends to stay, Jana nevertheless takes up a job with the local elderly care service and starts making house visits to ailing patients who are unable to look after themselves. Most of the people she visits are acquaintances, some quite close, from her past—a dark past full of abuse and violence that has scarred the twins permanently. Wherever she goes, Jana is confronted by the name Maria—a beautiful woman who seemingly wielded mythical power over many a married man in the town, including Bror, before breaking each one’s heart, and being found dead under suspicious circumstances. As she stays on, Jana gets irresistibly pulled towards John against the advice of almost everyone she meets and her own serious misgivings. Jana fights hard to retain her sanity as layer after layer of the secrets shrouding her own childhood, her family and the little community begin to unravel, while doing everything in her power to save Bror from the looming death.

My Brother is both like and unlike the Scandinavian thrillers I’ve read so far—it is dark, moody and for the most part as stark as the wintry landscape of northern Sweden and has a host of brooding, maniacal characters, but there is no serial killer here leaving gruesomely slaughtered victims in their wake nor a disturbed investigator racing against time to stop them. Smirnoff’s writing, and Anna Paterson’s faithful translation, is initially frustrating and needs a lot of getting used to. The subject—child abuse, incest, violence, suicides and whatnot—is not easy to read as it is and the trouble is compounded by the writing style with literally no punctuation—speech marks, capitalisation of names, or spaces between phrases. But, amidst all the bleakness, there is an underlying hopefulness that makes life bearable for the lead characters and the book eminently readable.

I certainly feel that my perseverance with My Brother was amply rewarded and I eagerly await the English translation of the remaining two books from the trilogy. My sincere thanks to NetGalley for the e-ARC of My Brother courtesy of Pushkin Press who deserve much praise for their splendid job of making world fiction accessible to booklovers all over the globe.

Honestly, this was a difficult read in several ways. First, the translation was difficult to get past. Stylistically, it made it hard to catch on to the pace of the book, understand the time frame, and who was speaking.

It was also such a dark book. There was so much disturbing content that I just didn’t have any enjoyment reading this and it was putting me in a foul mood.

Hard to get into but very atmospheric. Not everyone will like this book because some of the things that the characters go through, but that makes this story what it is.
Not my favorite, but it was good.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to review this book.
This one was really hard for me to get into and continue reading. It was a bit confusing.
I almost didn’t finish it but I hung in there. It did get more interesting and ended up being about a 3.5 for me which I’ve rounded up to a 4.

An enjoyable read that is well written with a gripping storyline and well developed characters that were believable. It is twisty and unpredictable and kept me guessing.

A difficult and troubling read which grew on me with time and if not for the pathetic translation, I’d have rated this higher; can’t say I’d have enjoyed this more because this is not an entertaining book.

The story revolves around a woman, Jana Kippo, who has returned to her childhood town where she and her twin brother suffered abuse at the hands of their father. As Jana recalls her childhood memories, she discovers painful secrets that she’d deliberately forgotten. There are a bunch of twists and secrets that are revealed through the progression of the story - some of them are bizarre, some downright sick! The character development was the best pert. Even though I didn’t feel any fondness for most of them, I caws able to sympathise with them and grieve for them. They were all complex, yet distinct in their own ways.

Sadly, the whole experience was ruined by the translation. I don’t know if that’s how Swedish is translated into English, but the lack of punctuation and the content being solely written in lower case made the experience irritating and incomprehensible. I had to focus more and reread paragraphs all over again for them to make sense.

Overall, not an easy read; there’s abuse of every kind in it - <b>children abuse, domestic violence, sexual abuse, unplanned pregnancy, child abandonment, incest, murder, alcoholism, substance abuse, death by disease</b> and what not. Could be triggering to some readers.

Thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Publication Date: September 6th, 2022.

3/5🌟.

My Brother by Karen Smirnoff is a very odd book set in the remote Swedish village of Smalanger , a place with secrets galore and populated by characters straight out of a David Lynch movie. The book is surreal and frequently quite shocking.

Jana Kippo returns to Smalanger after spending years away, to visit her twin brother Bror. who is living in the small farmhouse they grew up in. Even before arriving at the house she's reminded that despite her years away she hasn't been forgotten and very soon discovers that not everyone welcomes her return . Also stirring unwanted memories is the body of a young woman discovered in a remote area, a young woman whose complicated love life involved a large proportion of the male population of Smalanger .

It took me a while to get into the book,for the first couple of chapters it was quite hard to see it going anywhere and Jana just seems very strange rather than a character to take much interest in or like. As she integrates into a village where she was considered a rather unpleasant oddball before leaving it and Smalanger's ,often dark,secrets are revealed ,not least Jana's, it becomes much more involving as some very complex relationships emerge and dark secrets emerge from the shadows.

There are some difficult issues written about in this book and terrible things become almost the norm as they're written about in rather a deadpan way as if the abnormal and shocking is just the way it is in remote small communities like Smalanger. If that's liable to upset you please give this one a miss,it won't be for everybody.

Definitely something different and once it hit its stride I was hooked,.

My thanks to the Author publisher's and NetGalley for providing me with a Kindle version of this book to read and honestly review.
I am a big fan of Scandi Noir stories, and the blurb attached to this debut book made it a must read for me. However I must confess to some disappointment, maybe because of the hype I expected too much. Don't get me wrong it is beautifully written with superb characterisation throughout, and at no point was I bored, I just expected more, I kept waiting for a major shock or earth shattering surprise, that never materialised. Atmospheric bleak descriptive and disturbing, an intense tale of love pain and occasional violence.
I am led to believe the Author will take over the mantle of writing the next book to feature one of my favourite characters Lisbeth Salander, I look forward to the outcome.
Recommended.

My Brother is not a book for everyone. As a reader, you start a bit confused by the use of punctuation, but that's not it.

It is a tale of violence, alcoholism, pain, dysfunctional family relationships, and the dark secrets everyone knows about but pretends not to, all of which seem endemic in the small community where the novel is set.

The stories behind Jana, her twin brother Bror, and several other characters are harsh, sometimes difficult to digest, and occasionally simply horrifying. It can't say I enjoyed reading it, I don't think anyone would use that verb, but I found it painfully realistic, thought-provoking and intriguing. I did struggle to warm up to Jana in the beginning, but I have to admit I ended up completely engrossed in the action, both present and past.

As I mentioned, not everyone will like the book because of the sensitive topics it covers, but it is a well written, accomplished work by the author.

Karin Smirnoff Karin Smirnoff is the author of My Brother My Brother by Karin Smirnoff that was translated from the Swedish by Anna Paterson. I enjoyed reading the book but did not like how in the translation all the peoples names were written together as in one word. Jana was the girl and Bror was her brother and her twin, they were both redheads, John was her lover and had a hairlip and face that was burned in a fire. Maria was their 1/2 sister and we had a time finding out the truth of her suicide. She was married to John but divorced him and was with every man available, including Bror. What happened was that Jana's father threw Bror down a chute in the barn into the cattle excrement and then raped Jana. Bror came up and killed their father with a shovel. They were both below the age needed for murder. Karin leaves us with finding Diana who was Jana's daughter by either John or her father. I'll leave it to you to take it from here in the story. 20 years later we come to reconcile relationships.

It takes some work to read this book as essential punctuation is left out making the reader reread some sentences to work out if they were spoken by the characters or not. For me, that took out a lot of the enjoyment.

The story was also somewhat depressing and slow-moving for me.

I loved this unusual book, by Swedish author Karin Smirnoff, whom l had not read before. Her characters live in a raw world, full of pain and intensity, close to the darkness in life, with death stalking among them. The prose is engaging and the situation compelling. Her heroine Jana is somewhat enigmatic, but slowly her identity and backstory are revealed. It’s a bleak book, where happiness is stolen wherever it can be found, amid an inhospitable landscape. This was a very different read for me and at times, the narrative skipped through time and l had to pause and realise the change, but l soon warmed to Smirnoff’s style and was eager to read on.

Unfortunately towards the 75% mark I just had to stop reading this. The writing has that quirky, literary edge that sometimes works for me sometimes does not.

That added to the subject matter which is harrowing plus the bleak feel to the overall story and setting defeated me. It was making me feel off in a way that wasn't good for me.

It would, however, be HUGELY unfair of me to take away from the sheer power of this story and of the writing. Karin Smirnoff has a unique style and no fear of the dark side which will appeal to a wide audience. Therefore this review is completely subjective on every level and I would encourage the reading of it if it appeals. It might be your next favourite thing

I enjoyed the novel but it took me awhile to 'link into' the portrayed characters. The storyline is great and about twins who had a disastrous upbringing that led to murder. There are twists and turns as the disturbed and troubled lives of Jana and Bror (the twins) are revealed. A Swedish noir mystery that is recommended reading and worthy of five (5) stars.

This intense story doesn't read like a thriller at all, but rather as a quaint family drama in a small swedish village. Full of violence, alcoholism and religious trauma, it's written in an incredible style with barely any punctuation. The possibilities of interpretation are endless. Smirnoff expertly throws us small symbols, while also writing a feminist critique of society in which regress is almost inevitable, even though the only ones demanding it are long gone.

I highly reccommend this book to fans of Gillian Flynn. If you wish to read a book just as atmospheric and gory as hers, but maybe just a tiny bit more hopeful, this is the book for you!