THE RIVER by Laura Vinogradova

Translated by Kaija Straumanis

I’ll save you two minutes and just say this: The River is the most gracefully haunting thing I’ve read in years and a very strong contender for my book of 2025. The act of being within its pages was such an exquisite delight that it pained me to leave. It is both glacier and winter squall, comforting embrace and punch in the guts.

Rute has grown up without knowing her father. Her mother drifted from man to man, until things went awry and she ended up in jail for murder. Rute and her sister remained. Then her sister went missing. That’s all backstory, though. The book opens when Rute learns she has inherited her father’s house in a remote part of Latvia. She goes to check it out and meets Matilde and Kristofs, a brother and sister effectively raised by her dad. What she learns about herself, the land, these people… I’m not going to spoil it. Suffice to say, there isn’t a word out of place. And Vinogradova communes with nature much like Fosse. Thank the fjords, though, that she believes in punctuation.

This is a small miracle of a book. Read it.

The River by Laura Vinogradova (Tr. Kaija Straumanis)
Open Letter, 2025
108 pages