Caesaria

Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Translation

From Hanna Nordenhök comes a gothic tale set at the dawn of modern gynecology, when the female body appears as a cryptic landscape and male hubris reigns.

On a remote country estate in nineteenth-century Sweden, a renowned obstetrician keeps a young girl named Caesaria as a trophy: she was the first baby he delivered by caesarean section. She lives a dollhouse existence, characterized by supervision and punishment, assault and incarceration. Told in lush, elegant, and dreamlike prose, Caesaria narrates her confinement in the doctor's mansion and encounters with its mysterious inhabitants and visitors.

Radiating a low-level dread and sense of unease, Caesaria probes gender warfare and class oppression. What is reality to those who have grown up trapped in their own bodies, without connection to the outside world? Nordenhök shares an astonishing answer, almost mythological in scope, through the tale of one eponymous girl.