Strega () von Johanne Lykke Holm

A work of mythic reinvention about the power of girls coming of age in a world hellbent on containing their passions and imaginations… Strega left me breathless, angry, and then thrilled by the dare it leaves in the reader's lap

– Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and The Chronology of Water

Utterly immersive, Strega is a modern-day fairy tale in the primeval sense, a visceral, hallucinatory allegory of coming into womanhood. It’s at once timeless and completely new, with surprising and evocative prose – a glittering translation of a masterful work

– Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House and What Should Be Wild

If Fleur Jaeggy and Shirley Jackson had ever spent the night together in The Shining Hotel, their love child might have been Strega. As it was, this Strega came into the world through a different yet equally miraculous union: that of a writer and a translator of extraordinary talent. Its hypnotic, off-kilter prose dances the reader into a state of gloried frenzy, pressing the sometimes-nightmarish buttons of imagined memory as it probes the essence of being young, searching, and exploited

– Polly Barton, translator and author of Fifty Sounds

Strega is a charm: its vivid details work eerie magic. In sumptuous, prickly prose, Johanne Lykke Holm unsettles and astonishes her reader

– Isobel Wohl, author of Cold New Climate

Strega is the kind of book Lolita would write if she wrote like Thomas Mann. This book is sprawling with heart-shaped mirrors in wet grass, peach-coloured bedding, neon lights, knives. All the paraphernalia of patriarchal violence. Johanne Lykke Holm is from the school of Fleur Jaeggy and Frank Wedekind, she uses the young women as her stage and transports you to another world, where everything is scenography. As uncompromising and brilliant as she is disturbing, I am forever devoted to the cult of her

– Olga Ravn, author of The Employees

The prose is a treasure to explore. No one can fail to see its beauty. Strega is a shield of 180 pages. And behind it? A slow-acting poison. A spell, a rite of passage, a black diamond

– Göteborgs-Posten

‘I knew that a woman’s life can be turned into a crime scene at any moment,’ explains the protagonist early on in the book, giving the reader an indication of the violence to come… The female world that Lykke Holm depicts is remarkable and enchanting... When the maids’ hair spill over the sheets ‘like spilled ink’ I stand defeated, by great beauty and grief

– Dagens Nyheter

A beautiful, increasingly suspenseful brew with great semantic variety and European erudition… Read it. Surrender. And adapt it to film!

– Expressen