Anne Elvedal - Selected Title Author

What inspired you to write this book?

I love the psychological thriller genre because it allows you to explore the human mind, which is something I’ve always been interested in and the reason I first studied psychology, then trained as a nurse and began working in psychiatry. During my years in psychiatry, I learned an incredible amount about life and its dark sides, about how we humans are put together, for better or worse. So I wanted to write something about this environment. And I wanted to write about a group of patients that really left their mark on me, all the young women struggling with life, who took drugs and behaved self-destructively as a result of childhood abuse. It was heartbreaking, and at the same time infuriating, to see how one single person can destroy another. So I wanted to write something about that, and envelope it in a really exciting story.

How is your book different from other books in this area?

I wanted to write a slightly different thriller which has something important at heart; a story that tears at your emotions, makes you nauseous, curious and perhaps annoyed. I wanted to write about a slightly different kind of investigator, a psychiatric nurse, who offers a unique insight into a stigmatised world, while simultaneously exploring questions about memory and identity using controversial tools such as hypnosis. I also think, at the risk of offending some people, that a lot of crime novels skip the language and rely too much on the plot. But to get inside a character and describe a unique perspective, you also need to find a unique form of tension. That’s what I’ve tried to do. It’s then fantastic when Norwegian critics describe the book as genuinely different within the genre.

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