Set in Denmark, this is an atmospheric tale of mystery, memory and remembrance

1938. A corpse is found preserved in a peat bog on the border between Germany and Denmark. The body in the bog is that of a nineteenth-century soldier bent double underneath his coat as if asleep - a disquieting reminder of old ferocious battles fought over the region known as Schleswig-Holstein at a time when a new world war is about to begin. The border area is steeped in myth and folklore. Three men - a Danish policeman, a young German-Jewish refugee and a German professor - venture out into the quagmire to find clues to the soldier's identity. Soon afterwards, the professor disappears without trace.
2000. Esme Olsen, who works as a cleaner in the Institute for Historical Studies in Copenhagen, stumbles upon documents concerning the find in the bog. An amateur historian with a quirky personality, she can't resist `borrowing' the documents to read at home. Thus begins a many-layered journey into the past, both real and imagined. Esme's childhood, her relationship with her eccentric dead father, the opulence
of 1960s American automobiles, a packet of letters to the writer J D Salinger, the young soldier's drunken rape, and the discovery of the German professor's body down a well are skilfully interwoven to create a multivalent, atmospheric tale of mystery, memory and remembrance.

Eva-Marie Liffner was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1957. After studying, among other things, archaeology and the history of ideas, she became a journalist, later deciding to write fiction. Her first novel, Camera, was awarded four Swedish litieeary prizes, including the Flint Axe for the best historical crime novel of 2001. Imago, Liffner's second novel, was nominated for the August Prize 2003.

"A stunning work of art," the New York Observer wrote of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, "that bears no comparisons," and this is also true of this magnificent new novel, which is every bit as ambitious, expansive and bewitching. A tour-de-force of metaphysical reality, Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters. At fifteen, Kafka Tamura runs away from home, either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister. And the aging Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction, finds his highly simplified life suddenly upset. Their odyssey, as mysterious to us as it is to them, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle. Yet this, like everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.