In the suburbs of a snow-covered Swedish town, the life of a young mother is falling apart: her partner - a criminal of an unspecified nature - has disappeared and the authorities, following the movements of money, arrive at her, who is in danger of losing everything. She turns to her husband's companions, to the women she believed to be friends, but finds only closed doors, turned backs and betrayal. With her insistence, however, she finally manages to break through to the heart of one of her old friends, who decides to stop being the plaything of a criminal and, in the name of solidarity between women, will help the protagonist to take her life back in her hands in a Bonnie & Clide ending.
A strange novel, which at first seems like a typical Scandinavian noir but doesn't leave you disappointed when you realise it isn't, and which you can't help but keep reading until the last page.

Karin's a mess. Her life is a mess and she's a mess. Her lover John is gone and she's living with her baby- Dream- in an empty house surrounded by snow. It's a dark Scandi noir novel with a protagonist who is easy to dislike but you will keep reading.

I just couldn't reach anywhere near finishing this book. I am a mother myself and the fact that this woman consistently smokes around her baby girl, does not clean the house or wash any clothes or linen at all, was so annoying.
I understand that she lost her husband somehow, I didn't reach that far to get to know what happened, if this is actually described in the book. However, this is not a good excuse for her behavior.

A dark novel - tense and psychologically claustrophobic! It probably worked better in the original Swedish,, but overall I found it a little tedious read.

The White City gives a noir feel to the icy northern environs of scandanavia. Can a new mother and former lover of a professional criminal pull of the heist that will ensure her survival?

If you want a rough, bleak, and gritty read, this is for you!

As I moved towards the end of the novel, I expected some kind of climax, some kind of payoff--something. What I got instead was a fire at Karin's house, and Karin, Therese, and Dream sitting in the car. That's all. I don't really understand the arc of the story. There are some moments where Ramqvist makes Karin seem like a compelling character, but that quality is not sustained throughout the narrative. I understand that part of the point is that the reader, like Karin, is lost and unable to understand what is going on around her and why. We stay in the dark so that we can experience what she is experiencing. I've read other novels that are built on a similar premise. It doesn't work, however, in the case The White City.

Karin, a beautiful young woman who's dad rejects her finds solace with John who offers Karin what she needs most, affection and promises of a secure lifestyle...not just any lifestyle, he buys her a $15.000.000 mansion, a car, jewelry, the sky is the limit. He has one request, a child...which Karin does not want...how do you tell a man who offers you a lifetime of security, no? Soon Dream is born. Also Karin knows John is most likely a charismatic crook, living the high life, she enjoys the love and promises John offers.

Until the fatal day when reality comes knocking at her door. The mansion will be repossessed along with her car, and all her possessions. Karin finds herself alone with her daughter Dream, nowhere to go. Friends closing their doors to her.

Karolina Ramqvist immerses us into Karin's life, we get to know her intimately, I was unable to put this novel down. I love her writing style and will look for her next novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic ( Black Cat )

Karin is having a hard time this frigid winter. To begin with, her deadbeat, criminal boyfriend left her with their newborn baby girl Dream. Add to this that she has almost no cash left, no job, practically no food in the house and must use the least amount of electricity she can, so they don't turn that off. The worst part is she's about to lose her home and her car. Karin must find a way out of this problem, and Karolina Ramqvist's novel is all about her search for an answer.

Let me begin by saying that Ramqvist's writing is very appealing, with a fluid style that borders on the impersonal, the chill of which perfectly mirrors the wintery setting of the story. Yet behind this, Ramqvist is equally able to evoke the sparks of heated emotions, running the gamut of adoration for Karin's little baby Dream, to her regrets for getting involved with a gang of criminals and falling for the man who got her pregnant, and her fears of becoming homeless. This play between anxiety and serenity underlies the story throughout, giving the narrative an ominous feel to it, where any potential relief feels like it is always just beyond the horizon and practically unreachable.

That said, despite how great this sounds, it is also one of the reasons I had a problem with this book. I'm willing to admit that this may just be me, but sometimes there are authors that put too much "atmosphere" into their novels. We can overlook this if there are other elements to the story that balance this out. For example, if the character development is such that our empathy for the protagonist increases throughout the story. Another way to temper an atmospheric narrative is if the pace of the novel builds from the setup towards climax, which creates tension in the action. I also have seen the inclusion of unexpected escapes from the narrative with things like snippets of humor, or diffused observances, also works well to alleviate too much of a heavy ambiance.

That last example is what Ramqvist attempted to use to break the darkness, but I found these to be too few and too subtle to succeed fully, despite the more hopeful twist at the end of the story. Because of this, I found this book to be overall too monotone for my liking, and the many references to white and cold and snow that should have suggested light and hope, just felt dark and gloomy. Of course, I know there's a whole genre called Scandinavian or Nordic Noir, and certainly, this book would fit well into that niche, but usually those books are more crime fiction novels, and despite the criminals included here, this book doesn't really fit well with that.

All this just means that while I believe Ramqvist is a very talented writer, I found the book a bit too depressing for my taste. Thankfully, it isn't a very long work, and knowing that gave me enough patience to read it through (and to be honest, I might have given up on it before reaching the end if it was even a little bit longer). That said, although I'm sure that this book will still attract readers who like Noir genre novels, it just wasn't my style and I can't give it more than three stars out of five.

A really most excellent short story

Karin knew what she was getting herself into when she fell for John, a high-flying wheeler-dealer, but now John is gone and the coke-filled parties, seemingly endless flow of money and high social status have been replaced by cut telephone lines, cut heat, and cut cash. All that remains of Karin’s former life is the mansion he bought for her and his daughter. Now she is on her own with baby Dream. As the authorities zero in on organized crime, John’s shady legacy is catching up with her. Over the course of a few days, Karin is forced to take drastic measures to claim what she considers rightfully hers so that she can start over.

A celebrated bestseller in Sweden and the winner of the prestigious Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize, The White City is an arresting story of betrayal and empowerment against the odds. With slow-burning psychological intrigue and a steamy and seductive atmosphere, this bewitching novel is an intimate portrayal of one woman’s struggle to drag herself up from the depths of despair whilst struggling enormously to maintain control of her and her daughter's life. It is an excellent short story that grabbed me from the first, as short stories should do I guess, and never let go until the satisfying ending. Its 176 pages pack a real punch!

This book is a stand-alone sequel to The Girlfriend, the author's award winning novel from 2009 and I have already instigated a search for this book. The story is set over only a couple of days and it was great to read about the measures Karin takes to fulfil her most basic needs and to claim what she feels is rightfully hers. Loyalties shift in the blink of an eye as Karin's former friends disown her one by one as the money runs out. Although she knew what she was doing by marrying a chancer, I still felt a lot of sympathy for her struggle to re-capture her life.

There is a strong cast of characters in this book and their loyalties shift in the blink of an eye. The writing is taut and bristling with psychological suspense and the author effortlessly placed me directly in Karin's situation and allowed me to feel her isolation and desperation. Another very strong author to come out of Scandinavia and she has been put squarely on my ever expanding list of must-read authors.

Digger 95

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

The White City started off promising but ended up petering out for me. It is a short novel and the story is very narrow. Focused on a few days in Karin’s life, we zero right into her situation without getting any back story. Karin lives in a big house with her infant daughter. Her partner John is not there – maybe dead, arrested, disappeared – who knows. John was involved in some kind of unspecified criminal activity. Karin has no money and is on the verge of losing the house, her car and everything else. She makes the rounds to people she knows – they seem to be associated with John but it's not clear how -- to find money and figure out how to survive. In the end, Karin may or may not have found a solution. I’m not giving anything away. This is the story from beginning to almost the very end. What makes The White City promising in the beginning is the atmosphere Ramqvist creates. She does an excellent job of putting us in Karin’s head, and of laying out her desperation in looking after a baby while trying to salvage a life in such unpromising circumstances. But in the end, the focus remained too narrow for me, and I felt that too little was revealed. I ended up feeling like I participated in a writing experiment rather than reading a good novel. Others may get far more out of this one than me. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

An atmospheric short novel, The White City follows Karin, once married to John, who had some sort of criminal connections. John has disappeared, leaving Karin with a baby girl (Dream) she's not sure she even wanted. Not only that, the authorities are breathing down her neck about debts due to stolen money, and all of their "family" have abandoned her. Left alone to her devices, and to figure out how to survive, we follow Karin as she attempts to navigate this very new and very unfriendly world.

The entire novel takes place in the span of a few days, and it's all completely from Karin's point of view. It sucked me in more than I thought it would, and Ramvqist's writing is absolutely beautiful. You can really empathize with Karin, as you delve deeper into her mind and story. You may not think she's made the most intelligent choices, but you can empathize nonetheless. She's going through so many things that get highlighted here: new motherhood, suddenly single motherhood, rags to riches overnight, the loss of any support system. All are deftly handled, and show what happens to the woman left behind after a man involved in organized crime disappears, a story that is rarely told in other mob stories like The Godfather (referring to the movie, never read the book).

This book was a very quick read for me. It was easy to read Ramvqist's prose, and you really want to know where Karin might be headed. As you slowly piece things together, the picture becomes more and more complete. I did, however, have a few gripes with the book. For starters, it was billed as a psychological thriller. It definitely had the psychological part, but didn't have the investment or excitement that I usually get out of a taut thriller. For me, it was a little slow-paced and atmospheric to qualify as thriller, but I still did very much enjoy it. The other main gripe I had was that after the slow, dreamlike quality of the novel, the ending felt very rushed. It also wasn't very conclusive, which some people may not mind, but I'm not always a fan. I can see why it kind of works here, but still, not always my cup of tea.

Overall, if you like literary psychological studies, with fantastic writing and some crime connections, this is a great novel for you. I didn't hate it, and I didn't love it, but there were many things I appreciated about it. Ramvqist's writing style and prose was amazing, and the novel is worth the read simply for that. Karin is a character you want to care about, even if you disagree with her choices. If the ending wouldn't have felt so rushed, I would've been able to rate it a little higher, but I enjoyed it and hope you will too, if you choose to pick it up.

Note: I received this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, 'The White City' by Karolina Ramqvist tells the story of Karin whose drug dealer boyfriend John has abandoned her suddenly. With the threat of their house, car and other assets being seized by bailiffs, Karin is left to look after their infant daughter Dream on her own and decides to seek help from John's associates from the criminal underworld.

John's shady past initially suggested that 'The White City' would follow the conventional trajectory of a thriller. However, 'The White City' turned out to be much more meandering in tone and ambiguous in genre which is no bad thing. The most striking aspect of the narrative are the vivid and numerous descriptions of Karin breastfeeding Dream. Rather than confining the experience of parenting to a cursory mention here and there, Ramqvist places the tedium of the everyday caring responsibilities for a young child at the centre of the plot. Yet despite the repetitiveness of these actions, 'The White City' is compelling and tautly written and Ramqvist ratchets up the tension convincingly.

'The White City' is an atmospheric slow-burner and I would highly recommend it to those looking for something a bit different from typical Scandinavian crime fiction..

Karolina Ramqvist’s moody novel, In the White City, takes us into the life of a young woman named Karin who finds herself in a life she never imagined. When the novel opens, Karin is living in a huge lakeside home bought for her by her criminal boyfriend, John. John is gone, presumably (?) in prison and Karin, feeling bitter and betrayed, is left with their baby Dream, the child that John pushed for against Karin’s nagging feelings that having a family was not a wise move.

Karin, alone in the rambling house with just the baby, has just a few days before she is to be evicted. The utilities have been cut off and the house is freezing. She has nowhere to go, the little cash she has is running out, and the friends she thought she had from John’s criminal gang have evaporated when times got tough. The police and the tax authorities have documented the house’s contents and Karin faces a crisis that she is completely unprepared for.


This is a short novel, moody and depressing which nonetheless manages to incorporate a dreamlike quality into its style. This is a white world (as the title suggests). The house is cold and unwelcoming, and it’s surrounded by a frozen world of snow and ice, but there’s also a sense of blankness in Karin’s mind. She’s stunned by events and unable to cope.

Karin reaches out to a number of people for help–some of whom appear sympathetic and some who do not. Meanwhile she lives in a haze of depression, foraging in the house for food, and neglecting her baby.

The book’s blurb mentions “the coke-filled parties, seemingly endless flow of money, and high social status she previously enjoyed.” Scant reference exists of Karin’s former life, and I would have enjoyed knowing a bit more. When the book opens, everything has changed and not seeing how things were before, gives us little point of contrast, little point of loss. I was reminded of series 1 of Prisoners’ Wives and the glory stripped from Francesca Miller, but in that series we see Francesca’s fall from affluence each step of the way. Francesca finds her own worth in the series, tries to work a ‘normal’ job only to be dragged back in the Life. In The White City, it’s the aftermath of the party and Karin is left with the mop-up. There’s no such character development here–just a woman floundering in hopelessness.

The novel is strongest when describing the police who visit the house and deliver the news that Karin must leave:

And then they moved deeper inside the house. With quiet purpose. Greedily. Even if this was a purely routine call, they approached their plunder with an ill-concealed excitement. They stared in hot silence through her dirty windows, drinking in the view. Her view. They turned around and stared at the fireplace; its little white remote control was on the coffee table even though the gas had run out and it could no longer be lit. They looked at the painting on the far wall, her painting, the one she’d assumed was stolen when John gave it to her.

They had already sent an appraiser around, who’d gone through everything.

The descriptions of the landscape are excellent, and while the novel’s mood and atmosphere are well created, there’s just too many endless references to breast feeding that added nothing to the story, nothing to the plot. Karin is still in shock, her senses dulled and blunted. All this is conveyed well, but it is continual and after a while (and a visit from the Pizza guy) we realise that Karin must stop wallowing in the mess that landed on her doorstep and come to her senses. We get tiny glimpses (and I wish there had been more) into Karin’s former life–the bullet proof glass in the lakeside house, for example. Details of Karin’s former life infuse energy into this otherwise bleak, depressing tale:

Everything had been documented, every one of her purchases, each step she’d taken, or so it seemed. Pictures of her on airplanes and at the watchmaker. Tickets to Thailand and Brazil, gym memberships, dermatologists, timepieces, jewelry, cars. boats. The dog and the horse each had their own column.

Review copy

Translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel

Karin is used to living an exciting life of luxury. But all that changes when her husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her alone with a new baby. When her friends and so-called family turn their backs on Karin, she is forced to struggle through the disconnected phone lines, cut power, and desperation that follows her husband's death and an abrupt loss of virtually all funds.

I want to preface this by saying that, despite my low rating, I do think this was a well-written book and it definitely wasn't bad by any means. There are a lot of positive aspects of this book, and another reader might give The White City 4 or even 5 stars. Part of the low rating has to do with my own preferences.

This book was described as a psychological thriller. Now, when I think of psychological thrillers, I think of something full of suspense and excitement, with twists and turns that create an air of mystery. If that's what you're looking for, The White City isn't necessarily the book for that. This book is heavy on the psychological, but low on the actual thriller part.

Very little actually happens in this book. Most of the time is spent with Karin wondering how she is going to survive on her own and feeling generally hopeless, with occasional feelings of bitterness directed toward the people she thought would have her back. While I completely understood why she was feeling the way she was, I found myself feeling bored with what seemed like a repetition of the same thoughts over and over again.

While some parts of The White City felt like they dragged on and on, others went by way too fast, leaving me wondering if pages of my book had somehow gone missing. There were some very abrupt transitions where I had to go back and reread the previous few pages in a vain attempt to connect the scenes. I usually got the general idea, but those jumps made it even harder to stay connected to the story.

Ramqvist is a wonderful writer though. Her prose was gorgeous. I found myself rereading some of her lines just because I loved how they sounded so much. For that reason, I might even go up to 3 stars. But the great prose was not enough to make up for everything else.

Even with my low rating, I say that if you think this book sounds interesting, you should give it a read. I noticed there are a lot of 4 and 5 star ratings for The White City, so maybe it was just me.

3.5 stars. Karin knew what she was getting into when she fell for the high-flying criminal John. But never did she imagine it would end up like this.

John is now gone and so is the lifestyle she had grown accustomed too. Now she is living below the breadline with her telephone being cut off and with very little money. She now had a child to take care off.

Although this novel is well written, I found this a bit of a slow burner. There was not a lot happening throughout the book but the atmosphere is eerie and the ending was well worth sticking it out for.

I would like to thank NetGalley, Grove Atlantic and the author Karolina Ramquist for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was okay. Not amazing, nor was it awful. It was just mediocre.

I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, Karolina Ramqvist, translator Saskia Vogel and Grove Atlantic, Grove Press, Black Cat in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all, for sharing your hard work with me.

This is an excellent short novel, a fast read and a plot that won't let you loose. There is no way you can call it anything but dark, but it is dark that works very well. I will watch for this author in future.

In The White City, new mother Karin is clearly depressed. She’s struggling alone, the man she loves is gone. She calls her voicemail at low moments to listen to his final message to her, a suggestion they go kayaking on the weekend and a request to bring his sunglasses. The house is a mess. The snow has not been shoveled from the walkway. There’s no food in the house, she calls for pizza and the delivery guy expects to have sex with her.

What seems at first like postpartum depression and grief becomes more complex when two people from the government come by to tell her they are seizing her house and her car. We realize that John was a criminal, someone in organized crime. She suspects that some people owe her and seeks them out, asking them for help and discovers that the friendships built in criminal activity do not last. There is growing menace and danger as Karin seeks help from John’s partners.

I read The White City in one sitting. I was reading away, the recounting in minute detail of a day centered on feeding her daughter, taking a shower, changing diapers, and napping should have been dull as dishwater, but was so rich in mood and detail, so brilliantly written, that I was captured. The pages flew by, there’s a constant tension, a creeping unease.

So much of this story is told obliquely. We learn things by seeing things happen, we are never told, nothing is explained. Ramqvist trusts that we are smart enough to follow the narrative without explanation and she is right. This subtle and slow revelation, as piece by piece falls into place is brilliant and the kind of writing I most appreciate.

This is one of those stories that cannot be described by its plot. There’s no huge, intricate plot full of twists and turns. This is about atmosphere, about her dawning realization that her relationships may not be what she thought, that perhaps she must act. It’s quite wonderful.

The White City will be published February 7, 2017. I received an advance e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.