Girls Lost, Paperback

What would you do if you could switch genders? What powers would you gain? What would you lose? And who would you be if you could change how you are perceived? Winner of Sweden's most prestigious literary prize for young readers, Girls Lost is a YA-crossover thriller exploring these questions, following three teenage girlfriends: Kim, Bella, and Momo, whose developing bodies have become objects of abuse, both verbal and physical, by their male classmates. Scared and uncomfortable, the girls often hide away in Bella's greenhouse. One day, the three friends plant a strange seed in the greenhouse, and in a few days, a shimmering, magical flower blossoms. Intrigued, they drink the nectar from the flower, and suddenly find themselves transformed from girls to boys. The girls return night after night to drink from the flower, and as they fall deeper into the boy's world, they discover a new reality, one of power and violence, of gangs and drugs. In this tale, the body is a battlefield, and masculinity as a drug Brilliantly poetic and deeply poignant, this magical story was adapted into an internationally-renowned feature film exploring how we shape our identity, and how we cope with our own transformations.

Award-winning author Jessica Schiefauer (b. 1978) has established herself as one of Sweden's foremost writers of literary young adult fiction. Her widely praised first novel, If You Were Me (2009), was followed by the August Prize-winning The Boys (2011). Translated into several languages, The Boys was also nominated for the Nordic Council Debut Children's Book Award. In addition to two theater adaptations of The Boys (2014 and 2017), the film based on the book, Girls Lost (2016), was a huge critical success and won several international awards. Schiefauer's third novel, The Eyes of The Lake (2015), also won the August Prize, thus cementing her position on the Sweden literary scene. Exploring questions of self-esteem, coming of age, sexuality and gender, Schiefauer engages adults as well as young adults. She has contributed short stories to the erotica collection Hot (2012) and the science fiction collection Other Ways - Ten New Utopias (2015), among others. Schiefauer holds a teaching degree in Swedish, English and creative writing. She lives in Gothenburg, Sweden. Saskia Vogel is from Los Angeles and lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. She has written on the themes of gender, power and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp. Previously, she worked in London as Granta magazine's global publicist and in Los Angeles as an editor at the AVN Media Network, where she reported on the business of sex work and adult pleasure products.