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The Oblique Place is an exceptional literary journey, an achingly beautiful fusion of memories and history unlike any other.

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"Caterina Pascual Söderbaum has left a major European literary work of art as her legacy" STEVE SEM-SANDBERG, author of Emperor of Lies

The Oblique Place is a captivating journey of the imagination, a prize-winning novel that probes the ruinous legacies of Fascist Europe in the twentieth century.
The discovery of photographs in an album - of her Spanish grandfather who joined Hitler´s Wehrmacht and her father in the uniform of Franco´s army- leads Caterina Pascual Söderbaum to explore her family´s links to some of the most abhorrent passages of twentieth-century history. Her mother turns out to be related to Kristina Söderbaum, a celebrated Swedish film star of the Third Reich, adored by Goebbels.

She travels with husband and child to the shores of the idyllic Attersee in Austria, where the officers of the extermination camps spent their holidays. The journey continues from Schloss Hartheim, where the staff of the Nazi euthanasia programme forgot, with the help of alcohol and sex, the horrors that took place there, to the Villa Saint-Jean, where malnourished children from France´s internment camps were sent to recover.

This imaginative rediscovery of her own family´s disturbing history is fused with vividly captured episodes from other lives and times, and the threads of evil that she lays bare are described in language so beautiful, so subtle and painterly, that her odyssey is at once shattering and mesmerising.

Translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry

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As I was being drawn into this shimmering, meandering, luminescent novel I felt impatience and reverence in equal measure . . . initially, I would read a few pages and put the book down, only then to be unable to tear myself away, unwilling to stop being inside it . . . every page, every person, a space - a place - to be in, the experience lives on outside the pages of the book . . . The whole world can be found in Caterina Pascual Söderbaum´s An Oblique Place Anna Jörgensdotter Arbetarbladet 20161020

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Söderbaum, Caterina Pascual
Caterina Pascual Söderbaum, 1962-2015, lived between Sweden and Spain and worked as a translator of Swedish literature into Spanish. Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Sonetten om andningen (The Sonett on Breathing) (Lejd förlag, 2002), won Sweden´s Catapult Prize for best first work of fiction. The Oblique Place was to be her last novel, and was awarded the prestigious Sveriges Radios Novel Prize posthumously.

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