Paul Kessel

About a Swedish family during WW2 who help their friends, relatives and refugees to cross the border from Nazi occupied Norway.

I bet anyone can get better at golf than you are in one week, a golfer says to her golfing businessman for a boyfriend in a quarrel. Unfortunately Stig-Helmer is standing nearby when the boyfriend accepts the bet, and he is chosen to be the competitor. Stig-Helmer has never played the game before, but his Norwegian friend Ole promises to help him.

About the Swedish author Agnes Von Krusenstjerna during the period of her marriage to David Sprengel. In the hallucinatory opening sequence she is brought in a straitjacket by her husband and two psychiatric nurses through the Venice Carnival nocturnal antics to a mental hospital in the city. With her is a manuscript of her autobiography, which she calls "her child". The book is Agnes showdown with her family, and in flashbacks presented, Agnes progress from the author of innocent girls' books to serious and self-consuming novelist.