A deeply engrossing, philosophical novel by a rising Estonian literary star
Estonia, at the end of the seventeenth century: Laurentius arrives in the country, accompanied by a rose-ringed parakeet and hounded by melancholy. He has come to study the latest research – on bloodletting, the evil eye, the position of the soul in the body… Meanwhile, the poor are being devoured by hunger and the city walls of his university town don't keep them out; in his feverish sleep he dreams of a king with a high crown, and his waking life is stalked by paranoia.
Compelling, evocative and beautifully written, The Willow King is an unsettling tale of a time of witchcraft, of public executions and public dissections, when science and the supernatural were intertwined.
Meelis Friedenthal
is a writer and academic. Born in Estonia in 1973, he specialises in intellectual history, and has taught and conducted research at the universities of Tartu and Göttingen. He has published three novels and several short stories. The Willow King is his second novel, and won the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. Friedenthal has also won the Estonian Science Fiction Prize for his story Nerissa. The Willow King is being translated into twelve languages, and is the first of his books to appear in English.
