A novel based on a true story.
It is a novel about loss and pain. A younger sister narrates it about her older brother, about him or to him. Throughout the novel, she talks to him and tells him everything he missed, and remembers with him their shared past. Yoha goes on a sea trip: before he turned eighteen, but he did not return from it. Without anyone knowing where he went, he disappeared from the deck of the ship, leaving his family and friends searching in vain.
The sister monitors the stages of grief for everyone, and how pain turns into hope and vice versa, the pain of a sudden, incomprehensible, tragic loss, and the hope for its appearance and return again. But "Yoha" remains in the stage of non-life and non-death. A long journey approaching thirty years, they did not lose hope of finding him. We follow with the sister during those years the stages of her transition from adolescence to youth to marriage and motherhood, without omitting a single detail that she did not tell her absent brother, who is present despite his absence.
In a very sensitive narrative, the writer was able to contemplate life, death, memories, sadness, and absence, and make us reconsider what is around us, through events that we will not easily forget.
Inka Nosjaen, born 10 March (1976), is a Finnish writer. She has written works for adults, teenagers and children. She graduated from the University of Tampere with a Master's degree in Philosophy in 2002. She began her career as a writer at the age of 17 with the young adult novel The Language of Stones (1993), for which she received the Topelius Prize. Nosyain's second novel, Chinese Shoes (1996), also won the Savonia Prize for Literature. With her first children's book "The Night Book" (2015), she was nominated for a Nordic Prize
Council in 2017 with illustrator Satu Kettunen. She also wrote songs and the songs she wrote were recorded for several well-known Finnish singers.
