MAILE CHAPMAN, YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT SUVANTO

Called “a lucid dream of a book” by Audrey Niffenegger and “a superb hallucinatory piercing, an ominous dispatch” by Junot Diaz (who says that Maile Chapman is one of his favorite writers!), this is a brilliant and unnerving debut about the mysteriously ill female patients at a remote hospital in Finland. 

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 a late-summer day a new patient arrives —a faded, irascible former ballroom-dance instructor named Julia Dey.  The American nurse in charge of the hospital’s most privileged patients, takes it upon herself to pierce the mystery of Julia’s reserve.  Soon, Julia’s difficulty and tightly coiled anger place her at the center of the ward’s tangled emotional life.  As 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, 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. 

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.

“Maile Chapman has written a literary thriller that will please even the most discerning of intellects. Fans of historical fiction, suspense, and craftsmanship will not be let down by plot, style or pacing of this eerie Scandinavian thriller.”
—FOREWORD MAGAZINE