When I Forgot

Spring 2003, a single day in Helsinki. Anna had hoped for a quiet day of reading; instead she must travel to a psychiatric ward to see Joona, the younger brother whose mind first gave way when he was a teenager, egged on by a clergyman father who beat his children. Since then she has propped up her brother, her parents and also Ian, her American boyfriend, whose own childhood left him damaged. As she goes, she sifts through both families' histories, marked by mental illness and by the wars of earlier generations, Vietnam among them, and keeps returning to something that went wrong at an anti-war march against the invasion of Iraq a few weeks earlier, for which she still blames herself.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

158 pages in the original

Genres

Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

Finland, 2003

First published

2005 by Avain

Author's age

30 when first published

ISBN

9789525524161 (original)

9781846270949 (Portobello Books, United Kingdom)

9781846270956 (Portobello Books, United Kingdom)

9780980243659 (Tin House Books, United States)