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Loading... The Boy in the Suitcase (A Nina Borg Novel) (edition 2012)by Lene Kaaberbol (Author)
Work InformationThe Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbøl
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I really enjoyed this book. I "read" a lot of audiobooks, so I can listen while working in the garden, walking, driving, etc. I read this as an audiobook, and found it to be a little difficult at times. The narrator was good, but the book skips around a lot thus requiring a lot of attention, but sometimes my mind wanders while multitasking, so I had to go back. With an ebook, or even a (gasp!) printed book, one can more easily look back to see just who a certain character is. But as I read more, I was able to guess who each character was in almost all the cases. There was a lot happening in this book, and at the beginning it was hard to keep up. But it soon becomes obvious that everything is centered on, not surprisingly, a boy in a suitcase. He is briefly introduced right at the very beginning, but as the book skips around in time a lot, it's not obvious how it all fits together for a while, which made me want to keep reading to find out. Finally, near the end, it started coming all together, and had a nice ending. 3.5 stars. Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, has a rocky relationship at home, perhaps caused by her life experiences. A close friend asks her to fetch a suitcase in a train station locker, which she discovers contains a three-year old boy. Nina works to discover who the boy is while his kidnappers relentlessly work to track her down, leading to a thrilling conclusion. Usual Scandanavian social isses raised by Danish author.
Nina Borg, the central character in this startling novel from Denmark, has convinced herself she’s the only person who can save the world and put things right. She seems to be going at the monumental task one small job at a time. In The Boy in the Suitcase, she takes on international trafficking in young children, though at the start of the story she hasn’t the faintest idea of the nature of the terrible crime she’s dealing with. At first glance, Borg appears to be a modern feminist who has it all: a husband and three children, a roomy flat in Copenhagen, a fulfilling job as an International Red Cross nurse. But Borg, the idealist, is forever rushing off to the world’s hellholes to rescue the ill, the starving and the beleaguered. In the new book, the ghastly problem comes to her at home in Copenhagen. When Borg does a favour for a friend, picking up a suitcase at the city’s main train station, she finds a three-year-old boy inside the suitcase, drugged, naked but very much alive. The plot that unfolds from this astounding discovery includes murder, big money and acts of remarkable cruelty to children and their mothers. The two authors, Lene Kaaberbol and Agnette Friis, tell the story from the viewpoints of a half-dozen people. These characters cover the moral range from the suffering mother of the boy in the suitcase to the man who put him there and the other guy who financed the casually inhuman activity. But the narrative never loses sight of Borg, the woman who manages to persist in protecting the kid in the suitcase even when she realizes she’s risking the loss of everything decent in her life. Kaaberbol and Friis have had individual past successes in genres of much different sorts, best-selling fantasy novels for Kaaberbol, children’s books for Friis. Working together, they’ve come up with a novel of feminist crime fiction that has tremendous power. It’s a benefit to English-speaking readers that Kaaberbol provided the English translation, producing a highly appealing version of the original Danish book. Unlike other translations of Scandinavian crime novels, usually written by translators from England, this one is smooth, elegant and free of the usual tone-deaf English slang. Novels about stolen children are emotionally hard for most readers to handle, and yet they are instantly compelling because so much is at stake: a child’s tender psyche or even life...But when a 3-year-old is forcibly taken from his anguished mother, as happens in this terrific Danish thriller, you know you’re in for a frantic read. Is this “fun”? Yes and no. What’s for sure is that, once you start reading, you can’t stop — it’s as if the poor kid’s life depends on your getting to the end as fast as possible......This series debut — translated with assurance by Kaaberbol — looks like another winning entry in the emotionally lacerating Scandinavian mystery sweepstakes. Belongs to SeriesNina Borg (1)
Fiction.
Mystery.
HTML: Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two, is a compulsive do-gooder who can't say no when someone asks for help--even when she knows better. When her estranged friend Karin leaves her a key to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station, Nina gets suckered into her most dangerous project yet. Inside the locker is a suitcase, and inside the suitcase is a three-year-old boy: naked and drugged, but alive. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.81Literature German literature and literatures of related languages Other Germanic literatures Danish and Norwegian literatures DanishLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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When Nina Borg receives a frantic call for help from her estranged friend, Karin, she can’t help but respond. When she follows her friends instructions and picks up a cumbersome suitcase at a train station, all is well until her curiosity gets the best of her. Inside the bag is a naked three-year-old boy who doesn’t speak Nina’s language. Who is this child? Why is he naked? And why is he in a suitcase?
The story progresses with Sagita desperately looking for her little boy who has gone missing, but no one is listening to her; she has a past. When Sagita and Nina find themselves in the same place at the same time, all hell breaks loose and the truths of past and present collide with an unexpected twist.
This was a great read and superbly translated. It does take a bit of concentration to keep the names and places straight (because they are foreign), but other than that, it reads at a lightening pace. ( )