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. n 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 center of the ward s tangled emotional life. s summer turns to fall, and fall to a long, dark winter, the patients hear rumors 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.

About the Author :
Maile Chapman's stories have appeared in A Public Space, Literary Review, the Mississippi Review, and Post Road. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University and is currently a Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Review :
Rural Finland may not seem a very likely locale for a gripping intellectual thriller, but pulling this off is merely the first of Maile Chapman's many accomplishments here. Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto - what a title! - is as creepy as Patricia Highsmith at her best and as psychologically sharp (and confounding) as early Ian McEwan. With its portrayal of how quickly the conscience in shipwreck succumbs to delusion, Chapman has written more than a beautifully observed and utterly convincing first novel: she has written something of unfakeable importance. Maile Chapman is one of my favorite writers and in Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto she has given us an eerie gift of a novel. It is a superb hallucinatory piercing, an ominous dispatch from that Gothic frontier of the Female Body. Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is a lucid dream of a book; it is extremely clear and unnerving and full of gorgeously written surprises and frightening marvels