Three brothers—Nils, Benjamin, and Pierre—gather at the lakeside cottage where their family used to spend summers. It’s been years since they’ve been there, but their mother requested her ashes be spread there.
When they were children, the cottage was both an idyllic getaway and a form of torture. Close in age, the brothers both played together and fought tooth and nail, competing for their father’s attention and their mother’s mercurial love. But a tragic accident shattered the tranquility and caused reverberations that affected all of them, particularly Benjamin.
What happened that day? How did everything go so wrong from there? Over the course of a day, old wounds will be reopened, old fights rehashed, and memories will try and be reinterpreted.
The Survivors is the first book of Alex Schulman's, a bestselling Swedish author, to be published internationally. It’s told in a unique style, alternating between past and present, with the chapters taking place in the present going backward in time. It makes things a little confusing to process.
The reveal about the big incident is definitely a sucker punch, as I felt it came out of nowhere, but it was sad, too, as ramifications of it were explored. This was an interesting story but a little too opaque and meandering for me.
Thanks to Doubleday Books for the complimentary advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review! The Survivors publishes 10/5.
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