Author Description

It's 1947. Stig Dagerman, the young Swedish author on everybody's lips, is feverishly working on a play, his third. Skuggan av Mart/Marty's Shadow, as Stig will call it, will be his best-known play, and the most frequently staged both in Sweden and abroad. The play is inspired by real people: the Viennese-Jewish writer Etta Federn and her sons Jean and Michel. Stig Dagerman and his wife have visited Etta in Paris just weeks before he sits down to write the play. Some sixty years later, unknowingly and independently of each other, Lo Dagerman and Nancy Pick are pursuing research. Lo is in search of her father, the star writer who committed suicide when she was only three; Nancy is in search of her distant cousin Etta, the anarchist, feminist, journalist, force of nature, and role model; both are driven by a need to understand the persons whose absences from their lives bear such significance for their identities today. The play, Skuggan av Mart, brings Lo and Nancy together on their quests. And the brutality of it almost tears them apart. Why did Stig paint such a cruel and garbled portrait of Etta and her family? Lo and Nancy's pursuit of who Stig and Etta really were imbues the book, and pieces of the puzzle are fitted together along the way.