Marianne Ahrne was born in Lund in 1940. She received her master’s degree from Lund in 1965 and was a student at the Swedish Film Institute school from 1967 to 1969. During the 1970s she directed several films; she is today perhaps equally well known as a film director and as an author. She made her literary debut in 1980 with the psychological study Äppelblom och ruiner (Apple blossoms and ruins) and has published five novels since. The novel excerpted here, published in 1998, has strong autobiographical tendencies. Ahrne was herself the daughter of a Swedish mother and a Jewish refugee from war-torn Czechoslovakia who subsequently disappeared. Her effort to discover the truth about her own unknown father, whom she first met as a teenager, lies at the core of the novel. The excerpt that follows, the end of the novel, is the daughter’s attempted reconstruction of the history of the unknown father.