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Backlight
  • Published: 5 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241730072
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Backlight

  • Pirkko Saisio
Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
5 May 2026
EBook
5 Feb 2026
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A riveting, funny coming-of-age story: the second volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogy

Teenaged Pirkko can’t decide which she hates most: God, her communist father, or her growing breasts. Grandpa has moved into the room long promised to her, and Mother, overworked and distant, tries to keep the peace between her headstrong daughter and husband. It's 1960s Finland and Pirkko has fun getting into trouble. That is, until her teacher suggests she might have what it takes to be a real writer. Then the historic summer of 1968 arrives, which Pirkko spends working at a Swiss orphanage where no one understands her and, as much as her family drive her mad, she’s homesick for the first time.

As the world shifts and swirls around her, Pirkko must make sense of it all – including her own sexual identity. A funny, unique coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a life lived in language, Backlight is the second volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogy.

Translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg.
  • Published: 5 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241730072
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Praise for Backlight

Like Annie Ernaux but funny

Irène Bluche, rbbKultur

This is both family history and contemporary political history, sexual self-discovery and artist biography… moving and clever, funny and beautiful

NZZ am Sonntag, Best Books of the Century

If you love Deborah Levy, you'll adore Pirkko Saisio

Le Masque et la plume

Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio’s work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen

Niina Pollari, Los Angeles Review of Books