A Moth to a Flame

Dagerman wrote with beautiful objectivity. Instead of emotive phrases, he uses a choice of facts, like bricks, to construct an emotion

Dagerman wrote with beautiful objectivity. Instead of emotive phrases, he uses a choice of facts, like bricks, to construct an emotion

Dagerman can evoke such emotion in a single sentence

There are some writers (Kafka and Lorca immediately spring to mind) who come to enjoy the status of saint ; their lives and deaths constitute statements about existence and its proper priorities. A saint of this type is the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman.

A writer of uncommon urgency and power

A literary giant in Sweden, Dagerman conjures a Strindbergian atmosphere of shadowy menace in his brief, intense novel, A Moth to a Flame ... The novel absorbs the reader effortlessly... The landscape round Stockholm, with its fog-bound flatlands and grey winter seas, is vividly evoked. This moody, death-haunted novel is well worth reading

This searing tale of bereavement and loathing feels all too relevant today

Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) was regarded as the most talented writer of the Swedish postwar generation. He wrote his first novel at twenty-two, and received widespread acclaim; critics compared his writing to the likes of Kafka, Faulkner and Camus. Over the course of the next five years he published prolifically, always to immense success, before suddenly falling silent. In 1954 Sweden was stunned to learn that he had taken his own life, at the age of thirty-one.