Flora

Flora

A fresh and insightful exploration of what home is, how often we overlook it, and how sometimes—rarely— another person can be the home we’ve been looking for.

Flora, a young woman in her twenties, moves to Finland to be with her new boyfriend. Her old life on an island in Venezuela is on the other side of a vast ocean and, at the other end of weekly video calls, her parents and the life and world Flora left behind.

Her new life in Helsinki begins to take shape with the search for work, new friends, and learning a new language in a city where there’s a hair salon on every street corner and a Marimekko cloth tote bag ubiquitously hanging from its people’s shoulders.

Inviting the reader to observe Flora’s acculturation from the multiple viewpoints of her boyfriend, her father, both her boyfriend’s mother and ex, and Flora’s colleague the narrators also open themselves up to their own vulnerabilities and insecurities. Gradually, an intimate, prismatic portrait of a young, hopeful person emerges, along with an invitation to examine how we in turn perceive Flora
through our own definitions of love, friendship, and sense of belonging.

Loís Armas’ debut is an enchanting novel about Helsinki, the search for home, being an outsider, and longing for the people in the life left behind. Structurally akin to Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans, Armas offers a refreshing new perspective in this commercial debut from an emergent voice in contemporary Finnish fiction.

Materials

Full English Manuscript
Finnish PDF
Synopsis
Author Letter

Praise

‘Powerful and authentic.’ – Helsingin Sanomat

‘Flora succeeds in her complex literary solutions and offers an exceptional polyphonic description of the networks that grow around a person.’ 4/5 stars – Kulttuuritoimitus

‘Skillfully rendered.’ – Kirjavinkit