This novel is hard work! Translated from the Finnish, it is an autofictional account of the author’s life growing up in Soviet Finland and, later, in the ‘free state’. Sometimes, Pirkko writes as a child and sometimes as an adult, because the book is essentially a series of loosely connected anecdotes flipping backwards and forwards in time.

It emerges that she is a sickly child and uncertain about her gender. Her father and mother feature centrally, as do an extensive collection of aunts and uncles – all with their own odd stories and a variety of relationships. There’s also a lot of genealogy about all of these characters which makes the book even more complex and there’s a question about when Pirkko is, or is not, a reliable narrator.

As a portrait of a schizophrenic and divided nation in terms of its relationship with the Soviet Union there’s something quite insightful with her technique but for people it is harder to get a clear picture. Her father appears a lot but often seems to act erratically and there is little sense of his own development as Pirkko grows up. Also, the sharpness of the childhood recollections seems to vary from fairly precise to almost dreamlike, and there’s little logic to the ordering of the events.

Whether or not you think this exercise in autofiction works, will depend on the picture you get of Pirkko but for this reader, at least, that was always fragmented and it made the novel a more challenging read than it needed to be!