Elegant slippery and provocative Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish
author Hanna Johansson - a story of desire power obsession observation and taboo.
Antiquity follows its unnamed narrator a lonely woman in her thirties who becomes enamoured of
a chic older artist Helena after interviewing her for a magazine. Helena invites the narrator
to join her in the Greek city of Ermoupoli where she summers with her teenage daughter Olga. At
first an object of jealousy Olga morphs into an object of desire as the pull of Helena is
transposed onto her daughter and the prospect of becoming someone's first if perverse lover.
With echoes of Death in Venice Call Me by Your Name The Lover and Lolita but wholly
original and contemporary Antiquity probes the depths of memory power and the narratives
that arrange our experience of the world.
