Winner of the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for Best Debut

I'm twelve, nearly thirteen. I'm midway between childhood and womanhood, on my way to horror. In a moment I'll be nothing but flesh.

1990s Finland. A small northern village. A row house, a bedroom, a bathroom, a basement, a river island. Crimes are committed, but no one calls the police. No evidence is collected, no suspects questioned. Years later, a woman begins tracing the edges of her memory in search of the missing archive – the truth of what happened to her. To reclaim her humanity, she must write the truth into being.

Body of Evidence moves between novel, memoir and essay across five thematic parts – Place, War, Hysteria, Hole, Threshold. The narrator is at once the victim, the detective and the judge in her own case. She profiles the perpetrators, collects the evidence, maps the crime scenes. She compares her experience to war and soldiering, fills the gaps in her memory with testimony from literature, art and popular culture, and enters an imaginary courtroom only to find there is no justice waiting for her there. She is the only witness. She is still alive, and that is her paradox.

The novel investigates how the body remembers what language cannot reach, and how survival takes shape in the unstable space between remembering and forgetting. It circles questions of guilt and shame, sexuality and womanhood, motherhood and silence.

Ferocious, fearless and intellectually dazzling – Body of Evidence is a groundbreaking work of embodied memory that leaves no reader untouched.