Little Star

Lennart Cederström, embittered ex-pop singer, is foraging for mushrooms when he finds a baby left for dead in a plastic bag. He revives her and is utterly astonished by the sound of her crying: the child’s voice is a clear, haunting, perfectly pitched note.

Lennart decides the girl will be his project. Raised in isolation, untainted by the dross and banality of the everyday, she will become the vehicle for a pure, exquisite music. He installs the baby in the basement and threatens to kill his downtrodden wife if she breathes a word. But their delinquent son Jerry is a harder case and his ideas for the infant prodigy, whom he names Theres, involve talent shows, celebrity and enormous success.

Meanwhile the child is growing up and developing a few ideas of her own. Only hers involve a hammer. A hammer, and a very strong taste for violence and a strange ambition to appear on Swedish Idol.

Imagine what will happen when she finds a friend who shares her interests.

Praise for Little Star:

‘Little Star reaches a horrific climax at a music concert. Shades here of Stephen King’s Carrie, with both the apocalyptic conclusion and the depiction of the backgrounds that lead to the transformation of the girls into “wolves’‘ … Lindqvist certainly hits all the right notes.’

Canberra Times

‘Lindqvist, like Stephen King, with whom he has been compared, offers finely crafted and psychologically sharp parables of a cracked society … Against a backdrop of Swedish pop classics he concocts a climax of splattering intensity that gives an entirely new twist to the plastic positivism of girrrl power.’

The Australian

‘Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist is a strange but compelling novel: grotesque, funny at times, and very pointedly satirising the music industry, television and social media.'

Listener

‘Weaving such very European elements as Oedipus, Kasper Hauser, Dr. Frankenstein and Abba together into a relentless, driving narrative, Lindqvist has created a heartless but beautiful monster that lurches across the page.’

The Melbourne Review