Inger Edelfeldt was aptly described by the Swedish writer and critic Göran Hägg in 1990 as "denna märkliga korsning mellan Astrid Lindgren och Franz Kafka" (that remarkable cross between Astrid Lindgren and Franz Kafka). Like the renowned Swedish children's author Lindgren, she writes with deceptive simplicity and assured style and identifies with the young and vulnerable in society. Like Kafka, she is attracted to the macabre and fantastic and often employs cheerless, eerie settings where confused and unappealing characters are drawn to their seemingly inevitable fate. She is a student of human relationships and human weakness and explores the forces that mold people in childhood and adolescence. Her writing displays a wicked sense of humor and skillful mimicry of the banality of everyday language. Her prose is taut, precise, and enormously adaptable to a wide variety of styles; it was described by one...