Enchantment
Translated by Tabatha Leggett
Overview
Philippa Laakso was many things to many people. Caring and selfish. Kind to some, cruel to others. And now, she is dead.
When seventeen-year-old Philippa’s body is found in the yard outside her home, the police launch an investigation. Everyone close to Philippa is questioned.
The elderly neighbour who discovered her body, who kept confusing Philippa with his late wife.
The best friend, who hoards a secret stash of objects she’d stolen from Philippa over the years.
The ex-boyfriend, still reeling from their sudden break-up months before.
The mother whose children she babysat and who appears, enraged, in some of the strange videos Philippa filmed on her beloved PEN Olympus camera.
The older men she met via a dating app to whom she lied about her age.
Each tells a different story: she was a confidant, a fantasy, a temptation, a problem, a mystery, a mirror. But did any of them truly know her?
Enchantment is a spellbinding literary mystery that explores the fragile boundary between truth and fiction and the uneasy terrain of girlhood, where one is always being watched, shaped, and judged by others. In it, Riikka Pulkkinen weaves a complex story of identity, desire, and the quiet violence of being defined by everyone but yourself.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 198mm x 129mm
- 336 pages
- 9781915590770
- GBP£9.99
- 18 June 2026
- World English
- Elina Ahlbäck Literary Agency
Categories
Praise
‘Riikka Pulkkinen is a Finnish Joyce Carol Oates.’
Praise for The Limit:
‘One of the most intelligent philosophical novels in recent years’.
About the Author
Riikka Pulkkinen was born in 1980 and studied literature and philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of True, which was published in seventeen countries and shortlisted for the 2010 Finlandia Prize for Fiction. The Limit, her debut novel, was a bestseller in Finland and the Netherlands, and won the Kaarle and Laila Hirvisaari prizes.
Translator
Tabatha Leggett is a writer and literary translator based in Brooklyn. She is an incoming Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation MFA program and a graduate of New York University’s Fiction MFA program, where she was an Axinn Fellow. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the Community of Writers. Enchantment is her debut translation.
