They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears
SynopsisPlot
In the midst of a terrorist attack on a bookstore reading by Göran Loberg, a comic book artist famous for demeaning drawings of the prophet Mohammed, one of the attackers, a young woman, has a sudden premonition that something is wrong, changing the course of history. Two years later, this unnamed woman invites a famous writer to visit her in the criminal psychiatric clinic where she’s living. She then shares with him an incredible story―she is a visitor from an alternate future. Despite discrepancies that make the writer highly skeptical, he becomes increasingly fascinated by her amazing tale: in her dystopian future, any so-called “anti-Swedish” citizens are forced into a horrific ghetto called The Rabbit Yard. As events begin to spiral and the author becomes more and more implicated in this woman’s tale, he comes to believe the unbelievable: she’s telling the truth.
Story
About this book
They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears by Swedish-Ugandan author Johannes Anyuru opens with a terrorist attack on a bookstore in Sweden. During a reading by a comic book artist known for inflammatory drawings of the prophet Mohammed, one of the attackers, a young woman, experiences a sudden shift in perception that alters what happens next. Two years later, she is living in a criminal psychiatric clinic and asks a writer to visit her. She tells him she has come from an alternate future.
In her account, the society she left behind has turned against people deemed insufficiently loyal to the state. Citizens labeled as threats are confined to a place called The Rabbit Yard, a segregated zone of surveillance and control. The writer listening to her story is skeptical at first, finding gaps and contradictions, but he grows absorbed as details accumulate and as his own life begins to intersect with what she describes. The novel moves between these two timeframes, building tension around the question of whether her version of events can be trusted.
Anyuru sets his story against recognizable anxieties about political polarization, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the boundaries of free expression. The speculative structure allows the book to examine how fear and exclusion can reshape a society without presenting a single fixed prediction.
