Overview

What would you do if you could switch genders? What powers would you gain? What would you lose? And who would you be if you could change how you are perceived?  Winner of Sweden's most prestigious literary prize for young readers, Girls Lost is a YA-crossover thriller exploring these questions, following three teenage girlfriends: Kim, Bella, and Momo, whose developing bodies have become objects of abuse, both verbal and physical, by their male classmates. Scared and uncomfortable, the girls often hide away in Bella's greenhouse. One day, the three friends plant a strange seed in the greenhouse, and in a few days, a shimmering, magical flower blossoms. Intrigued, they drink the nectar from the flower, and suddenly find themselves transformed from girls to boys. The girls return night after night to drink from the flower, and as they fall deeper into the boy's world, they discover a new reality, one of power and violence, of gangs and drugs. In this tale, the body is a battlefield, and masculinity as a drug. 

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9781941920954

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Reviews

2021 Pen Translation Prize Finalist Without doubt a worthy and interesting August Prize Winner. - Aftonbladet Surprise of the year: Girls Lost /... / Completely unexpected and well executed. - Smalandsposten Brave fantasy with existential questions /... / Well done to Jessica Schiefauer for not choosing the simple way. - Sydsvenskan The style is unadorned, with powerful metaphors. The language is hard and soft; aware of the ferocity of a flower. - Dagens Nyheter In a glowing and contemporary saga about love, death and rebirth [Jessica Schiefauer] helps her three teenage Orlando characters free themselves and explore the limits of the self. Together, and on their own, the three characters explore their genders, their bodies and their desires, beyond established boundaries. During the day they are the girls : the maladjusted, the exposed, the constantly observed. When night falls they become the boys : the anonymous observers. /... /...the borders of existence are - and must be permitted to be - so much larger than the volume restricted by the skin. - Expressen I'm super excited about it... This is going to be one of those power-packed little books. - Ink and Paper Blog Girls Lost is captivating as its three leads explore the universal challenges of teenage angst, conflicts between perception and reality, and the power of another's gaze to free or entrap you. - Foreword Review, Kristen Rabe A powerful novel about gender, sexuality and power relations that will have you turn page after page without even realizing it. Thanks to Saskia Vogel, the poetic and empathetic voice of this novel has found its way into the English version. - Book of the Week, 24 Stories While its plot is relatively easy to summarize-three teenagers discover that a mysterious plant can change them from boys to girls-Jessica Schiefauer's Girls Lost doesn't avoid the complexities that could arise from such a scenario. The ways in which desire and identity converge within the pages of this book have the power to haunt, even as the narrative moves forward at a rapid pace. It's a page-turner that lingers. - Words Without Borders, Tobias Carroll A powerful novel about gender, sexuality and power relations that will have you turn page after page without even realizing it. - 24 Symbols

Without doubt a worthy and interesting August Prize Winner. - Aftonbladet Surprise of the year: Girls Lost /... / Completely unexpected and well executed. - Smalandsposten Brave fantasy with existential questions /... / Well done to Jessica Schiefauer for not choosing the simple way. - Sydsvenskan The style is unadorned, with powerful metaphors. The language is hard and soft; aware of the ferocity of a flower. - Dagens Nyheter In a glowing and contemporary saga about love, death and rebirth [Jessica Schiefauer] helps her three teenage Orlando characters free themselves and explore the limits of the self. Together, and on their own, the three characters explore their genders, their bodies and their desires, beyond established boundaries. During the day they are the girls : the maladjusted, the exposed, the constantly observed. When night falls they become the boys : the anonymous observers. /... /...the borders of existence are - and must be permitted to be - so much larger than the volume restricted by the skin. - Expressen I'm super excited about it... This is going to be one of those power-packed little books. - Ink and Paper Blog Girls Lost is captivating as its three leads explore the universal challenges of teenage angst, conflicts between perception and reality, and the power of another's gaze to free or entrap you. - Foreword Review, Kristen Rabe A powerful novel about gender, sexuality and power relations that will have you turn page after page without even realizing it. Thanks to Saskia Vogel, the poetic and empathetic voice of this novel has found its way into the English version. - Book of the Week, 24 Stories While its plot is relatively easy to summarize-three teenagers discover that a mysterious plant can change them from boys to girls-Jessica Schiefauer's Girls Lost doesn't avoid the complexities that could arise from such a scenario. The ways in which desire and identity converge within the pages of this book have the power to haunt, even as the narrative moves forward at a rapid pace. It's a page-turner that lingers. - Words Without Borders, Tobias Carroll A powerful novel about gender, sexuality and power relations that will have you turn page after page without even realizing it. - 24 Symbols

Shiefauer captures the experience of adolescence with striking immediacy and complexity as she explores vital issues of gender and power. - Jessie Chaffee, Words Without Borders Without doubt a worthy and interesting August Prize Winner. - Aftonbladet Surprise of the year: Girls Lost /... / Completely unexpected and well executed. - Smalandsposten Brave fantasy with existential questions /... / Well done to Jessica Schiefauer for not choosing the simple way. - Sydsvenskan The style is unadorned, with powerful metaphors. The language is hard and soft; aware of the ferocity of a flower. - Dagens Nyheter In a glowing and contemporary saga about love, death and rebirth [Jessica Schiefauer] helps her three teenage Orlando characters free themselves and explore the limits of the self. Together, and on their own, the three characters explore their genders, their bodies and their desires, beyond established boundaries. During the day they are the girls : the maladjusted, the exposed, the constantly observed. When night falls they become the boys : the anonymous observers. /... /...the borders of existence are - and must be permitted to be - so much larger than the volume restricted by the skin. - Expressen

Without doubt a worthy and interesting August Prize Winner. - Aftonbladet Surprise of the year: Girls Lost /... / Completely unexpected and well executed. - Smalandsposten Brave fantasy with existential questions /... / Well done to Jessica Schiefauer for not choosing the simple way. - Sydsvenskan The style is unadorned, with powerful metaphors. The language is hard and soft; aware of the ferocity of a flower. - Dagens Nyheter In a glowing and contemporary saga about love, death and rebirth [Jessica Schiefauer] helps her three teenage Orlando characters free themselves and explore the limits of the self. Together, and on their own, the three characters explore their genders, their bodies and their desires, beyond established boundaries. During the day they are the girls : the maladjusted, the exposed, the constantly observed. When night falls they become the boys : the anonymous observers. /... /...the borders of existence are - and must be permitted to be - so much larger than the volume restricted by the skin. - Expressen

Author Information

Jessica Schiefauer has established herself as one of Sweden's foremost writers of literary young adult and adult fiction. She has won the August Prize twice for her books Girls Lost and The Eyes of the Lake. Her books have been translated into several languages and adapted into theater and film. She has contributed short stories to the erotica collection Hot (2012) and the science fiction collection Other Ways: Ten New Utopias (2015), among others. Schiefauer holds a teaching degree in Swedish, English, and creative writing. She lives in Gothenberg, Sweden. Saskia Vogel is from Los Angeles and lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. She has written on the themes of gender, power and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp. Previously, she worked in London as Granta magazine’s global publicist and in Los Angeles as an editor at the AVN Media Network, where she reported on the business of sex work and adult pleasure products. Her novel, Permission,, was published by Coach House Books in 2019.

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