Sunny Taylor is an American nurse who hides behind a mask of crisp professionalism at a Finnish convalescent hospital called Suvanto. On a late-summer day, a new patient arrives on Sunny’s ward, and soon Suvanto’s reliable calm begins to show signs of strain. As summer turns to fall, and fall to a long, dark winter, the escalating menace of Maile Chapman’s astonishing debut novel builds to a terrifying conclusion.
Maile Chapman is the author of Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto. Her stories have appeared in A Public Space, the Literary Review, the Mississippi Review, and Post Road. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University and teaches at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
"Shockingly, bracingly good."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“As Maile Chapman shows in her unsettling novel Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto, [Finland is a] particularly apt place to stage a story of natural menace and encroaching lunacy: its isolation, its quiet, and its trains-running-on-time Grundlichkeit make it a perfect place to go mad.”—Harper’s
“Unputdownable . . . a feminist thriller.”—Vogue
“Sometimes a novel bursts out of the gate with a premise that’s utterly specific and original. . . . In Suvanto [Chapman] has created a world in which the crust of civility, like the ice of the frozen bay outside, is brittle, underlaid by darkness and on the verge of giving way.”—The New York Times Book Review