My Mother Gets Married

Originally published in Sweden in 1936, this rare novel is the first volume in Martinson's acclaimed autobiographical trilogy. Told through the seven-year-old child Mia's eyes, the novel portrays a life of dreadful poverty, recording in detail Mia's beautiful mother's pregnancies by her handsome but hard-drinking and unfaithful husband; the succession of rented rooms infested with rats and lice, where Mia lives; the insiduous separateness and cruelty that the haves inflict on the have-nots. "A poignant, yet unsettling documentary story that transcends time and place in its depiction of the struggles of the working poor, deserving of a place alongside such notables as Sinclair Lewis, Ole Rolvaag, and John Steinbeck."-Booklist