Description
Book SynopsisIn the beginning of the winter thaw, Lars Lennart Westin has learned that he will not live through the spring. Told through the journals of this schoolteacher turned apiarist, The Death of a Beekeeper is his gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain.
Westin has refused to surrender the time left to him to the impersonality of a hospital, preferring to take his fate upon himself, to continue his solitary, reflective life in the Swedish countryside. While he watches his inner landscape reforming, the relentlessly intimate burning in his gut provides a point of psychological detachment. 'We begin again,' he insists, 'we never give up.'
Trade ReviewThis thoughtful and beautifully written novel… We cannot fail to be moved -- Diana Hinds * Independent *
Has all the lyric intensity we have come to associate with Scandinavian films…It is full of spirit, observation, insight, sadness, struggle, pain and, inevitably, of hope -- Frieda McGreal * Yorkshire Post *
Sensitive and vivid -- Wendy Jennings * Church Times *
The landscape of pain has never been defined more graphically… A disturbing, moving and thought-provoking novel that stays in the mind long after it is read * Jewish News *
It is brilliant: an evocative book of exquisite beauty and exceptional wisdom… Hope is the theme of the novel, and it is explored sensitively, intelligently and philosophically by an author who knows the impact of simple, precise language… Art can change the way we see the world and Gustafsson is a fine, fine artist -- Ken Spillman * West Australian *
A beautiful work, lyrical and bleak, resonant and terse * New Yorker *
