Kahele poole koske

Jari Järvelä
born 1966
Aino and Sofia live in a small town in Western Finland, one on one side of a river, the other on the other. In the civil war, one family was on the Red side, the other on the White side. More than half a century has passed, but the war still cuts the town in half like a river. Only one little boy, Aino and Sofia's grandson, reaches both sides of a waterfall.
One of the most unique authors in contemporary Finnish literature, Jari Järvelä, has drawn on the material of his former summers spent with his grandmothers when writing this novel. He tells the story of two little girls with understanding and humor, whose souls have been irreparably wounded by the horrors they witnessed in the war, but interweaves the war stories with tragicomic images of his own childhood in Finland in the 1970s.
In the book's afterword, translator Kadri Jaanits introduces the author's diverse work in more detail and adds background to the historical events depicted in the novel.