Winner of the prestigious August Prize for best Work of Literary Fiction In the midst of a terrorist attack on a bookstore reading by Göran Loberg, a comic book artist famous for demeaning drawings of the prophet Mohammed, one of the attackers, a young woman, has a sudden premonition that something is wrong, changing the course of history. Two years later, this unnamed woman invites a famous writer to visit her in the criminal psychiatric clinic where she's living. She then shares with him an incredible story-she is a visitor from an alternate future. Despite discrepancies that make the writer highly skeptical, he becomes increasingly fascinated by her amazing tale: in her dystopian future, any so-called "anti-Swedish" citizens are forced into a horrific ghetto called The Rabbit Yard. As events begin to spiral and the author becomes more and more implicated in this woman's tale, he comes to believe the unbelievable: she's telling the truth. A remarkably intense, beautifully wrought tale that combines the ingenuity of speculative fiction with the difficulties of today's harsh political realities, They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears is the groundbreaking, award-winning work from the bestselling Swedish-Ugandan author Johannes Anyuru. With echoes of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, and anti-immigrant hysteria, this largest and most complex novel from an already celebrated poet, author, and spoken word artist catapults him to the front ranks of world writers.
"Between the past, present and future, Johannes Anyuru weaves a novel of powerful elegance, which speaks of the madness we're approaching and a way, perhaps, of escaping it."
Le nouveau magazine littéraire
"Walter Benjamin meeting Paul Virilio, meeting Donna Haraway, it is streams of consciousness full of verve and slang."
Aftonbladet
"They Will Drown is political pamphlet, futuristic dystopia and a personal book of thoughts at the same time. . . . The novel becomes an almost physical experience-a punch."
