Author(s): John Ajvide Lindqvist

Fiction

Lennart Cederstrom, embittered ex-pop singer, is foraging for mushrooms when he finds a baby left for dead in a plastic bag. He revives her and is utterly astonished by the sound of her crying: the child's voice is a clear, haunting, perfectly pitched note. Lennart decides the girl will be his project. Raised in isolation, untainted by the dross and banality of the everyday, she will become the vehicle for a pure, exquisite music. He installs the baby in the basement and threatens to kill his downtrodden wife if she breathes a word. But their delinquent son Jerry is a harder case and his ideas for the infant prodigy, whom he names Theres, involve talent shows, celebrity and enormous success. Meanwhile, the child is growing up and developing a few ideas of her own. Only hers involve a hammer. A hammer, and a very strong taste for violence and a strange ambition to appear on Swedish Idol. Imagine what will happen when she finds a friend who shares her interests.