11/06/2024
In 19th-century Sweden, a baby girl is born from a C-section performed by a renowned obstetrician. This is a rare surgery to survive for a baby, and the doctor keeps her in his mansion as a trophy. He names her Caesaria. Under constant supervision, she will live a dollhouse existence, subject to systems of control and punishment, sharing with us everything she sees and hears. Who are the doctor's mysterious visitors? What is there in the outside world? Where does she come from?
In a Gothic style, Caesaria explores the ways in which early gynaecology experimented with the female body which appeared as a cryptic landscape to be intruded, invaded, controlled.
"I was astounded by Caesaria. It's such a captivating immersive read, like falling down a rabbit hole of shifting impressions, small revelations and the unravelling of time itself. I've never read anything quite like this. It's a hall of mirrors bound up in a book" Jan Carson
"A novel as beautiful as it is unsettling. Hanna Nordenhok's prose combines with singular mastery the density of poetry with the feverish atmosphere of a Gothic tale" Fernanda Melchor
"Nordenhok's locked up mansion is a disciplinary system of supervision and punishment, a claustrophobic spectacle where death and disaster are indisputable components in the condition of being a girl. Caesaria is wonderful! Johanne Lykke Holm
Pre-orders on our website: https://www.heloisepress.com/book/caesaria
Published in North America by Bookhug Press
