Wonderland

From the Swedish author of Caesaria comes a spellbinding examination of the many shimmering faces of deception and the power of lies to reshape reality.

The three main characters inWonderland wander through an ominous, foreboding present-day world filled with abandonment and false appearances. They are themselves all liars, deceived, or both. An unhoused woman travels between cities and towns along the American West Coast, pretending to be a child. At a hotel in Athens, two rival Catalan journalists become entangled in a high-risk game of fact and fiction. A wealthy housewife barricades herself in a luxury villa in the south of Sweden, choosing to lie at the expense of others in order to maintain the only life she can tolerate living. All around them appears a hall of mirrors filled with unreliable characters: cunning children, doped-up martial artists, ghostwriters, dishonest politicians, eco-criminals, and fashionable jetsetters so disfigured by plastic surgery that there seems to be nothing left of their original selves.

Written in hypnotic, crystal-clear prose, this captivating novel portrays a slippery post-truth, late-stage capitalist society—one that, eerily, resembles our own—where reality and illusion are never easily distinguished.