Vita brevis: a letter to St Augustine
- 164 pages
- 6 hours of reading
A playful and inventive work from the bestselling author of SOPHIE'S WORLD.



A playful and inventive work from the bestselling author of SOPHIE'S WORLD.
From the author of SOPHIES WORLD, a contemporary novel about a teenage girl, dying from cancer, who is visited by an angel.
Anna has returned from visiting her mother. Restless and unable to sleep, she wanders through her parents' house, revisiting the scenes of her childhood. In a cupboard drawer, folded and pushed away from sight, she finds a sepia photograph of her grandmother, Hanna, whom she remembers as old and forbidding, a silent stranger enveloped in a huge pleated black dress. Now, looking at the features Anna recognises as her own, she realises she is looking at a different woman from the one of her memory. Set against the majestic isolation of the Scandinavian lakes and mountains, this is more than a story of three Swedish women. It is a moving testament of a time forgotten and an epic romance in every sense of the word.