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WORK TITLE: The Dying Game
WORK NOTES: trans by Rachel Willson-Broyles
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/10/1974
WEBSITE:
CITY: Stockholm
STATE:
COUNTRY: Sweden
NATIONALITY: Swedish
http://ahlanderagency.com/authors/asa-avdic/ * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2148864/asa-avdic
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born April 10, 1974.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, and radio and television presenter. Formerly a presenter for Swedish Public Service Radio and Television; became host of morning current events program Morgonstudion.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Asa Avdic is a Swedish journalist who was a presenter for Swedish Public Service Radio and Television before becoming a host of Sweden’s biggest morning current events program. In her debut work of fiction, The Dying Game: A Novel, Avdic presents a tale of a future Orwellian society in 2037. Most of Europe lives under the totalitarian Union of Friendship regime, which evolved from the fact that the Berlin Wall never fell and the Eastern communist bloc just grew stronger. “I wanted the story to take place in a world similar to ours, but I wanted to make up my own rules,” Avdic noted in an interview for the Strand Online. Avdic went on to remark that she enjoyed the freedom to create, noting: “To an investigative reporter and news journalist like me, this seemed very luxurious and forbidden! Still, I didn’t want my world to be a ‘once upon a time’ fairy-tale world without limits, so I came up with a kind of counterfactual idea of a totalitarian northeast Europe.”
The government has established a competition to take place on the tiny island of Isola. Seven people are selected to compete for a job in the intelligence bureau, with each of the contestants competing to see who reacts best to a potentially lethal scenario. The contestants include a television host, a business executive, a marathon-running HR star, and an elderly man who calls himself the Colonel. Anna Francis, however, is not like the other contestants. Her task is to fake her death and then from hiding observe how the others react to it and the fact that there is a murderer among them. The government wants to determine how the contestants respond to pressure and who has leadership skills. “The Dying Game is an intriguing mix of the old and the new,” wrote Bookreporter Website contributor Norah Piehl, adding: “Its isolated setting and limited cast of characters are reminiscent of classic ‘locked room’ mysteries…. But its near-future setting and Orwellian setup make it feel almost chillingly forward-looking as well.”
Anna is a working mother with a nine-year-old daughter whom she barely sees because she works so much. Furthermore, she has a secret that continues to prey on her mind. As the novel opens, Anna has just returned to Stockholm, Sweden, after an assignment in remote Kyzyl Kum, a large desert located in Central Asia. Her little-seen daughter, Siri, has been staying with Anna’s grandmother, Nour. When Anna is approached to participate in the RAN project and to serve as a spy in the contest, she is initially hesitant but then agrees, telling herself just one more time and that she needs the money. A stranger to Siri and estranged from Nour, Anna is packing her bags to go to Isola when she “realizes how much she’s lost over the past few years, how estranged she is from her own family,” as noted by Curled up with a Good Book Website contributor Michael Leonard.
It turns out that a former love interest, Henry Fall, is one of the participants in the contest. When Anna reads his dossier, it appears to her that Henry may have a personal agenda for his time on the island. After the contest begins, the plan for Anna’s fake death goes awry when people begin disappearing until eventually a real murder is committed. As Anna continues to observe the goings-on, she eventually realizes that a complicated bureaucracy has instituted a conspiracy that has inextricably involved her. Calling the plot “fascinating and original,” a Publishers Weekly contributor went on to note that Avdic “makes her imagined reality chillingly plausible.” In his review for the Curled up with a Good Book Website, Leonard remarked: “As expected, there are multiple layers and threads as Avdic explores the concepts of cowardice and bravery, hope and acceptance.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of The Dying Game.
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2017, review of The Dying Game, p. 31.
ONLINE
Ahlander Agency Website, http://ahlanderagency.com/ (April 24, 2018), brief author profile.
Bay Area Book Festival Website, https://www.baybookfest.org/ (April 24, 2018), brief author profile.
Bookreporter, https://www.bookreporter.com/ ( August 4, 2017), Norah Piehl, review of The Dying Game.
Culturefly, http://culturefly.co.uk/ (December 22, 2017), Natalie Xenos, review of The Dying Game.
Curled up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (April 24, 2018), Michael Leonard, review of The Dying Game.
Strand Online, https://strandmag.com/ (August 20, 2017), “A Conversation with Asa Avdic.”
Asa Avdic is a journalist who for years was a presenter for Swedish Public Service Radio and Television and is currently a host of Sweden’s biggest morning current events program. She lives with her family in Stockholm, Sweden. The Dying Game is her first novel.
Asa Avdic is a journalist who for years was a presenter for Swedish Public Service Radio and Television and is currently a host of Sweden’s biggest morning current events program. She lives with her family in Stockholm, Sweden. Her first novel, “The Dying Game,” received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which raved that Avdic is “Agatha Christie meets George Orwell… Avdic not only constructs a fascinating and original plot but makes her imagined reality chillingly plausible.”
A CONVERSATION WITH ASA AVDIC
Posted on August 30, 2017 by Asa Avdic
A Conversation with Asa Avdic
How would you describe The Dying Game?
I struggled for a long time to find the right words for what kind of book The Dying Game is, because to me it’s just a story I had in my head that I wrote down. I had to find a way to tell people what I had written. So, I decided to call it dystopian crime.
The book takes place in 2037, but it’s a counterfactual history, so you’ve not only invented the future but also reinvented the past. How? And why?
I wanted the story to take place in a world similar to ours, but I wanted to make up my own rules. I’m a journalist by profession and have spent almost my entire working life reporting and chronicling the real world, so in my novel I loved having the freedom to make things up, straight out of my head. To an investigative reporter and news journalist like me, this seemed very luxurious and forbidden! Still, I didn’t want my world to be a “once upon a time” fairytale world without limits, so I came up with a kind of counterfactual idea of a totalitarian northeast Europe, where the Berlin Wall never fell and the Eastern bloc just got stronger, bigger, and more isolated from the rest of the world. And, as totalitarian states almost always do, they slowed progress and development. So in “my” world, the 2030s of the book is more like a really bleak version of the ’90s as we knew it. This gave me the world I wanted—it’s our world, but at the same time it’s not.
I should also say that since I am European with a diverse background, I do have relatives from the totalitarian states of the old Eastern bloc. My extended family is from both Bosnia (formerly Yugoslavia) and the former DDR (East Germany), and I have always been very interested in the effect that totalitarian regimes have on human beings. How one responds to the threat of always being overheard or betrayed, to never knowing who’s watching you, to never knowing whether tA Conversation with Asa Avdichings that come your way are a reward or punishment, or even why? Some of the weirdest things in the book actually have happened to my extended family.
Did being a news broadcaster and investigative reporter influence your writing of the novel?
Very much so. In fact, the last third of the book is kind of a “mockumentary” of interrogations after the situation on the island went down. There are some intense interview techniques at work in those interrogation scenes, and they were very fun to write. But also the perspective of the book, told from different angles, by different persons, sometimes contradicting one another, contributes different pieces of the whole story . . . a very journalistic way to build a story.
Have you based your characters on real people?
For the most part, no, I haven’t. That’s the beauty of fiction, to be able to invent not only events but also people. There are, of course, in the book references to real events and people that I’ve met. For example, my Swedish editor, whom I’ve known forever, recognized her old staircase in my character Nour’s apartment. Another friend discovered that his great-grandfather’s name is also the name of one of my minor characters. Ha-ha. I had no idea that I borrowed these things. But then the details transformed themselves into new things and new people, strange to me as well. It had a little bit of a magical feeling, and because of this feeling, I never want to do anything else besides write fiction and make things up.
But, honestly, isn’t there a resemblance between the character Nour and your own grandmother?
Yes, okay, there is. She is the only character who is loosely based on a real person. My grandmother was also a very special person to me. She was really tough, blunt, truthful, and she didn’t spare anyone’s feelings. The same kind of personality as Nour. I spent a great deal of my childhood at her farm in the Swedish countryside, and I really loved her, but I was also afraid of her. She would always tell me the truth, and she was very loyal . . . just like Nour in The Dying Game. My grandmother died a couple of years ago, and I still miss her terribly, so to write Nour was a way to get to hang out with her a little bit more.
Your grandmother grew up in the U.S.?
Yes, she was the child of immigrants. Her father left Bosnia, Yugoslavia, and settled in Butte, Montana, where he met my great-grandmother, an immigrant from Sweden. They married and soon had four daughters. Then things spiraled downwards. My great-grandfather died in a mining accident, and my great-grandmother moved with her daughters to Chicago, where she became a Christian Scientist. When she contracted tuberculosis, her religion forbade medical care, and eventually she died.
My grandmother and her sisters, now orphans, were shipped to their mother’s relatives in Sweden, where they all were adopted, except for my grandmother. Grandma stayed with her aunts and uncles on the farm, which she eventually inherited, and lived there for the rest of her life.
My grandmother used to show me the most amazing photos from Butte and Chicago: the four sisters climbing on Model T Fords, Bosnian Muslim miners with fezzes on their heads outside the mine in Butte. Her whole life she felt America was her real home and it had been taken away from her. To her, it was the place where every dream could come true, no matter what your background was. I think she would have been truly devastated by recent events in American politics.
One of the story lines in the book is the relationship among Anna, her mother, Nour, and Anna’s daughter, Siri. How would you describe their relationship?
I once called it “dark Gilmore Girls” because there are three generations of women, and they make choices about their lives that are contrary to one another. There are love and hate and guilt and loyalty that bind them together. But there isn’t any sappy sentimentality in the Nour/Anna/Siri relationship; it’s more in your face. I’ve always been interested in the bonds between mothers and daughters.
Would you say that a major theme in The Dying Game is whom to be loyal to and whom to trust?
Yes, it is. Most of the story takes place in a sort of “locked room” situation, where Anna is about to perform a kind of social experiment on the other guests on the island, but the experiment derails, and Anna finds herself not knowing whom to trust. Eventually she wonders if she really can trust herself.
In my professional work as a journalist, I have often been involved in live broadcasts of big catastrophes, like terror strikes and such—situations where you have to make crucial, split-second decisions—so I’m really interested in these kinds of events, where it sometimes seems that there are only bad choices at hand.
At the end of the book, you seem to leave an opening for a sequel. Is that so?
In fact, I’ve just started writing it. It feels good to be reunited with some of the characters again. To be continued . . .
ÅSA AVDIC is a journalist and popular television host at Swedish Public Service Television, SVT. In the fall of 2016 she made her literary debut with the psychological thriller The Dying Game.
Avdic has worked as a host for Swedish Public Service Radio and Television for many years and currently serves as a popular host for Sweden’s biggest morning current events show, Morgonstudion.
Avdic lives with her family in Stockholm, Sweden.
Avdic, Asa: THE DYING GAME
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Avdic, Asa THE DYING GAME Penguin (Adult Fiction) $16.00 8, 1 ISBN: 978-0-14-313179-3
In the not-too-distant future, a group of carefully chosen people spends 48 hours on a remote Swedish island engaged in what at first seems like an exercise but turns into a high-stakes test of survival and betrayal.It's 2037, and the world is shockingly different yet terrifyingly the same: there's been another Cold War, and, at least in the Protectorate of Sweden, loyalty to the all-powerful government is paramount. Anna Francis, recently back from a soul-sucking assignment in remote Kyzyl Kum, is as chilly as a Stockholm winter, a distant mother who leaves her 9-year-old daughter with relatives more often than she sees her. In the well-worn tradition of "just this one last time" that never ends well, she's approached by the Chairman to participate in the top-secret RAN project, not as an actual member but as a quasi-spy. As if Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None was cross-pollinated with "The Most Dangerous Game," Anna is charged with observing a small group of hand-selected Swedes for two days on the island of Isola; that is, until she's meant to fake her own murder and disappear into the walls of the compound to watch how the others respond to the "crime." One of the participants is Henry Fall, a former colleague for whom she'd developed feelings, though the romance is as dry as the paperwork Anna reads in preparation. Turns out Henry has his own agenda on Isola, one that isn't wholly clear, though he and Anna are often frustratingly close to the same goal. Avdic's debut, while painting an unsettling portrait of our possible future, lacks a compelling main character, and for all the book's calculated plotting, it doesn't add up to a satisfying read.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Avdic, Asa: THE DYING GAME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329277/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2f377151. Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329277
The Dying Game
Publishers Weekly. 264.23 (June 5, 2017): p31+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Dying Game
Asa Avdic, trans, from the Swedish by Rachel
Willson-Broyles. Penguin, $16 trade paper
(288p) ISBN 978-0-14-313179-3
Agatha Christie meets George Orwell in journalist Avdic's unsettling first novel, set in Sweden in 2037. A coup has led to a state of martial law and the country's transformation into a protectorate under the aegis of an international entity known as the Union of Friendship. Anna Francis, a bureaucrat, is estranged from her family and tempted by an unusual job offer from a high official called the Chairman. The Chairman explains that the secret RAN Project is short-handed and that a psychological exercise has been devised to identify a suitable new member of the team: prospective candidates are to be transported to a remote island, along with Anna, who will pretend to have been murdered, so that she can covertly observe their reactions to the unexpected trauma. Things don't go as planned, and Anna soon has a real murder to deal with. Avdic not only constructs a fascinating and original plot but makes her imagined reality chillingly plausible. Agent: Astri von Arbin Ahlander, Ahlander Agency. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Dying Game." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 31+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538312/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=112a9b58. Accessed 19 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495538312
The Dying Game
by Asa Avdic
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Scandinavian suspense fiction has been a real find for American readers over the past decade or so. Now there’s another new name in the game --- Asa Avdic, whose debut novel, THE DYING GAME, manages to feel both classic and futuristic at the same time.
The year is 2037, and the place is Sweden, which is part of a totalitarian state called the Union of Friendship. Its citizens live in an isolated, bureaucratic society, subject to censorship, oppression and the whims of the state. At the center of the novel is Anna Francis, a dedicated bureaucrat whose workaholic tendencies landed her a series of accolades and promotions --- until one of them, a posting in the remote refugee camps of Kyzyl Kum, resulted in some unspecified disaster, and Anna’s former celebrity doused in ignominy and notoriety.
"THE DYING GAME is an intriguing mix of the old and the new. Its isolated setting and limited cast of characters are reminiscent of classic 'locked room' mysteries by writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and P.D. James."
At the novel’s opening, however, Anna is being given an intriguing opportunity. She has been offered a short-term position as, essentially, a spy. She will be placed on a remote island in the archipelago off Stockholm, along with five other people, each of whom is being considered for a top intelligence position. Anna is, with the help of a doctor, supposed to fake her own death (positioned to look like a strangulation) and then, using the island house’s complicated surveillance system, observe how the other candidates react to her “murder.” Who exhibits leadership skills? Who cracks under pressure?
Faced with the prospect of significant monetary gain and the opportunity to have a more normal life with her nine-year-old daughter (who’s increasingly been cared for by Anna’s mother during her lengthy work-related absences), Anna leaps at the assignment. She’s never been one to shy away from a challenge, after all.
But very soon things start to go awry. Anna unexpectedly knows one of the other competitors, for one thing, and her staged “murder” does not go exactly to plan, either. And then, in the confusion that follows, people start disappearing, and eventually someone winds up dead, for real this time.
THE DYING GAME is an intriguing mix of the old and the new. Its isolated setting and limited cast of characters are reminiscent of classic “locked room” mysteries by writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and P. D. James. But its near-future setting and Orwellian setup make it feel almost chillingly forward-looking as well. Perhaps befitting its setting, much of what we know about Anna and the other characters (several of whose points of view we glimpse during the denouement) requires reading between the lines of the narrative’s unemotional, almost detached tone.
Unlike the locked room mysteries of yore, THE DYING GAME does not tie up every loose end with a tidy bow. Instead, the conclusion, while satisfying from a mystery perspective, leaves open several moral questions and encourages readers to continue musing about potential motivations.
Reviewed by Norah Piehl on August 4, 2017
The Dying Game
Asa Avdic
Penguin
Paperback
288 pages
August 2017
rated 4 of 5 possible stars
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Click here to read reviewer Luan Gaines's take on The Dying Game.
Tunneling us into 2037 and to a never-ending Cold War, Advic explores how--through no fault of our own--we can fall down a rabbit hole of suspicion and paranoia. Anna Francis has been lauded for her fantastic efforts at Kyzyl Kun, an aid station situated on the border of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. An exhausted Anna is now back in the Protectorate of Sweden, grateful for the opportunity to spend time helping refugees. She’s been called to a meeting with a man called The Chairman to talk about the RAN project, a field exercise that evaluates people under extreme conditions by using a faked murder as a stress test.
Because Anna fits seamlessly into any situation asked of her, The Chairman is anxious to use her as a tool in this “high-pressure situation” in which she will “evaluate and assess" how the candidates handle her dramatic demise. Anna can’t return to the controversy that surrounded her last days at Kyzyl Kum. She’s also currently estranged from Nour, her 70-year-old grandmother who looks after Anna’s young daughter, Siri, “a little girl who sometimes doesn’t even know whether she has a mom.” As Anna packs her bags to travel to Isola, an isolated island situated at the very edge of Sweden’s outer archipelago, she suddenly realizes how much she’s lost over the past few years, how estranged she is from her own family.
Anna wonders whether she’ll ever reconnect with Henry Fall, an ambitious young man with whom she recently had an affair. The situation is complicated when Henry actually arrives on the Island as one of the group that includes a television host, a business executive, a marathon-running HR star, and an elderly man who calls himself The Colonel. As Ana ensconces herself in the house’s narrow hallways and furtively looks through peepholes, she feels overwhelmed by the mission, by the Island, by her faked death, and by this strange gathering of people. There must be no traces that could put the classified nature of the operation at risk.
As expected, there are multiple layers and threads as Advic explores the concepts of cowardice and bravery, hope and acceptance. Events don’t go exactly as planned. As Anna attempts to fulfill her mission, she discovers the truth about the intentions of The Chairman and Henry, who seems to invisibly take command from the moment he arrives. When Anna discovers Katya (the girl who gave her the drugs) lying in a pool of blood, she confronts the truth behind the mission and the role she has played in this intricate conspiracy. There’s a glimmer of possibility under all the layers of this complicated bureaucracy.
The book is an obvious retelling of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None with its thickening plot, isolated setting, and series of violent twists as one by one, each character appears to be killed off. Although the dystopian nature of the novel adds a frisson of originality, the story would have had more impact if Advic had just ditched the futuristic elements. Limiting the action to a crooked, Orwellian society governed by a group of shady government autocrats sometimes muddles the novel’s message. Advic doesn’t give us a fully-fledged picture of this world, apart from dropping a few hints--the Union of Friendship, the second Cold War in the early 2000s, and climate change and emissions having accelerated Anna’s increasingly dark moods.
The novel works best in Anna’s search for answers in the cold, surreal madness, though this thread is too often scrambled and confusing. There are too many subplots concerning Anna’s past and too much happening in the present, with no real closure or resolution. Although I never really embraced Avdic’s altered future, I thought the author did a good job of conveying Anna and Henry, their lives thrown into chaos by The Chairman, who proves to be a truly Machiavellian master manipulator.
Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Michael Leonard, 2017
BOOK REVIEW: THE DYING GAME BY ASA AVDIC
NATALIE XENOSDECEMBER 22, 2017
BOOK REVIEWSBOOKSFEATURED
Asa Avdic’s debut psychological thriller, The Dying Game, is a contemporary locked-room mystery that takes place in a near-future Sweden. Blending the twisty multiplying crimes and isolated setting of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None with the paranoid dystopian themes of The Hunger Games, it poses question after question, mystery after mystery, to keep readers guessing at what’s actually going on.
It’s 2037 and Sweden has been part of the Union of Friendship since the 90’s. The story’s primary protagonist, Anna Francis, is a workaholic who’s haunted by her time working in a war zone and has a nine-year-old daughter she hardly ever sees. So when she’s offered the opportunity to take part in a forty-eight hour test on the remote archipelago of Isola, along with six other candidates vying for a secret intelligence position, she sees this as her chance to set things right and make up for the past she’d rather forget.
Only Anna isn’t actually a candidate – she must observe the others to determine which of them is best suited to the role, despite not knowing what the role in question is. Anna’s assignment is to stage her death on the first night and disappear underground, where she can watch the candidates from inside the walls of the house to see how they handle the news of her ‘death’, as well as the threat of a potential murderer amongst them. But Anna’s task is far from straightforward and, as the rules of the game begin to shift, Anna starts to lose control of the situation, as well as herself.
The story begins from Anna’s point of view but darts between other characters as the drama unfolds, revealing events from varied perspectives both during the experiment and in subsequent interrogations, where it’s clear something went drastically wrong. Avdic ekes out the titular dying game, never revealing answers until it’s necessary and even then, some things are left a mystery, open to interpretation. There’s a feeling of creepiness right from the first chapter, as seemingly clueless characters head into a situation that’s set-up to string them along.
From start to end, Anna remains a tricky character to empathise with because she’s so detached. She’s clearly miserable with her life and has shut herself off from the world, even going so far as relinquishing parental rights of her daughter, but her personality is a closed book. This extends to the other characters too, chiefly Anna’s colleague Henry, who’s the other main POV. Instead of getting into their individual mind-sets though, we view them from the outside, almost as if we, the readers, are a part of the observation assignment. This can be frustrating, in that you never feel like you understand who these characters really are or what drives them.
Where the novel gets interesting is in trying to decipher who’s telling the truth and which of the candidates is in on the game, if any of them. The interrogations amp up the tension, as multiple characters get the opportunity to give their two cents’ worth. It’s just a shame these same characters remain empty shells with ambiguous motivations, even after they give evidence.
Despite not being quite the thrill-ride the title suggests, The Dying Game is an eerie and atmospheric book that works best as a cautionary suspense story exploring power plays and totalitarianism.
★★★
The Dying Game was published by Windmill Books on 2 November 2017