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Another of the year's strong fiction debuts—following Jean Kwok on Saturday—is this by Maile Chapman with Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto (Graywolf), a novel set at a women's convalescent hospital in Finland in the 1920s. "Rural Finland may not seem a very likely locale for a gripping intellectual thriller, but pulling this off is merely the first of Maile Chapman's accomplishments here. Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is as creepy as Patricia Highsmith at her best and as psychologically sharp (and confounding) as early Ian McEwan. With its portrayal of how quickly the conscience in shipwreck succumbs to delusion, Chapman has written more than a beautifully observed and utterly convincing first novel: she has written something of unfakeable importance." - Tom Bissell. "Maile Chapman is one of my favorite writers and in Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, she has given us an eerie gift of a novel. It is a superb hallucinatory piercing, an ominous dispatch from that Gothic frontier of the Female body."- Junot Díaz.
