Lowest Common Denominator
  • Published: 11 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241730096
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:

Lowest Common Denominator

  • Pirkko Saisio
Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
11 Nov 2025
EBook
7 Aug 2025
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A riveting, funny coming-of-age story: the first volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogy

‘Grandpa says everyone should leave me alone. If I want to be a boy, then I’m a boy: simple as that.’

Writing in the wake of her father’s death, the narrator of Pirkko Saisio’s autofictional novel transports us to the 1950s Finland of her youth, where she navigates life as an only child of communist parents. Convinced she will grow up to become a man, a young Pirkko keeps trying and failing to meet the expectations of the adults around her.

With wit and style, Saisio captures the heart-wrenching intensity of childhood feeling, merging fever dreams with sensory-laden memories as each formative experience – with the Big Bad Wolf, a bikini-clad circus announcer, and Jesus Christ himself – drives her further and further from her family and others. Struggling to understand her place in the world around her, it’s in language that she discovers a refuge and a way to be seen at last.

An unforgettable story of transformation, Lowest Common Denominator is the first volume in a trilogy that has been celebrated in Finland as the best work of the century.
  • Published: 11 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241730096
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:

Praise for Lowest Common Denominator

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

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

Playful and profound, Lowest Common Denominator offers a captivating glimpse into twentieth-century Finland through the eyes of a charismatic child narrator. I loved it

Fiona Mozley

Saisio gives us a humorous and empathetic account of the challenge of coming to terms with the world we are born into. It’s a world animated by the distances between generations, shimmering with the individuality of parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Sensual, curious, imaginative and funny, Saisio reminds us that being someone’s child can be a deeply queer experience

Anna Poletti

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

Le Masque et la plume

Droll, sardonic... A piquant account of a childhood and a time... Saisio sketches a poignant, funny-sad picture of a communist family in Cold War Finland. In both substance and style, comparisons with Ali Smith may come to mind

Boyd Tonkin, Spectator

One of Finland's greatest living authors... Lowest Common Denominator, elegantly translated by Mia Spangenberg, is the first of her works to be published in English and the first in her Helsinki trilogy, which is in the peculiarly bleak Scandinavian tradition of autofiction

New Statesman