The Survivors

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11:59 p.m.

A police car slowly plows through the blue foliage, down the narrow tractor path that leads to the property. There is the cottage, lonely on the point of land, in the June night that will never be entirely dark. It s a simple red wooden house, its proportions odd, a little taller than it should be. The white trim is flaking, and the siding on the south-­facing wall has faded in the sun. The roofing tiles have grown together, the roof like the skin of a prehistoric creature. The air is still and it s a little chilly now; fog is collecting near the bottoms of the windowpanes. A single bright yellow light glows from one of the upstairs windows.

Down the slope is the lake, still and gleaming, edged with birches right down to the shore. And the sauna where the boys sat with their father on summer nights, staggering into the water afterward on the sharp rocks, walking in a line, balancing with their arms extended as if they had been crucified. The water s nice! their father shouted once he had thrown himself in, and his cry sang out across the lake, and the silence that followed existed nowhere but here, a place so far from everything else, a silence that sometimes frightened Benjamin but sometimes made him feel that everything was listening.

Farther along the shore is a boathouse; its lumber is decaying and the whole structure has started to lean toward the water. And above that is the barn, beams drilled with millions of termite holes and traces of seventy-­year-­old animal dung on the cement floor. Between the barn and the house is the small lawn where the boys used to play soccer. The ground slopes there; whoever plays with his back to the lake has an uphill battle.

This is the stage, this is how it looks, a few small buildings on a patch of grass with the forest behind it and the water in front. An inaccessible place, as lonely now as it was in years past. If you were to stand at the far end of the point and gaze out, you wouldn t

ALEX SCHULMAN is a bestselling author and journalist and the co-host of Sweden's most popular podcast. The Survivors, which has sold in over 30 countries, is his fifth novel and marks his international debut. He lives in Sweden with his wife and their three children.
 
RACHEL WILLSON-BROYLES majored in Scandinavian Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, and received her BA there in 2002. She started translating while a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies in 2013. She has translated books such as Helios Disaster by Lina Boström Knausgård, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito; A Nearly Normal Family by Mattias Edvardsson; and Montecore and Everything I Don’t Remember by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Rachel lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
 

"A lyrical novel of psychological suspense...Powerfully rendered."
Wall Street Journal

"An audacious tour de force, The Survivors takes you deep into an emotional labyrinth. You'll cry for these brothers. For the men they became, for the boys they were, for the innocence they lost. Brilliant, haunting and unforgettable."
Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove

"The Survivors is a tight, tense marvel of emotional and psychic pain that is as chilling as it is heartbreaking. With precise, evocative prose it winds and coils towards a remarkable conclusion that left me breathless."
Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street and These Women

"In this taut thriller, three grown brothers bear their mother s ashes to a remote lakeside cabin, where they pore over a crime committed twenty years earlier Their shared history is a Pandora s box of secrets.
Oprah Daily

A bleak and beautiful tale of a shattered family and one terrible summer.
Literary Hub, CrimeReads

"Startling and original."
Kirkus (starred review)

"Searing...Schulman writes in an understated prose and has an intuitive feel for the subtleties of gesture and memory."
Publishers Weekly

"Already an international bestseller, Schulman's novel is extraordinary in its structure...An entrancing, gripping read."
Booklist

"Evokes a landscape seen through a child s eyes, where beauty and terror are inseparable...An accomplished debut."
The Guardian