A short summer, and then fall is here. Watch out for the release of Baby Blues by talented author Ester Roxberg.

A mother wanders alone around with the stroller in 30-degree Stockholm in the middle of July. All friends are away on vacation and there is nowhere to go with a small baby, in addition to the open preschool and parent group she attends. The daily life surrounds her like a wet blanket, and she lives in her own emotional microcosm. Who has she been? And above all: Who will she become?

I walk like a nobody behind the stroller and press it forward with all my might. I go over old chewing gums stuck and shaped into round, dark tracks on the road. I still have not gotten used to this. I still wonder who is walking here with this stroller. I look at the people around me, wondering what it is they see when they look back at me. I would like to ask them. What did you see before, when it was just me? Does it show that I’m a mother now? I am no longer Agnes, twenty-nine years, the receptionist. How have I changed? What does this new me really want?

In Baby Blues the author circles around issues of parenting and of belonging. How does one go about to remain an independent person when the outside world so intensely want to insert another, when one’s life is defined by what they do rather than who they are? Baby Blues is an amusing but disturbing novel right here and now – a blues over all things transience that has an unusual sound of solfège and sharpness.

Words without borders in the UK publish a part of the praised book, The memory of a secret -My dad, Ann-Christine, by Ester Roxberg. Read here.

The film rights for the praised book My dad, Ann-Christine, by talented author Ester Roxberg, are sold.

My dad, Ann-Christine (Min pappa Ann-Christine) is a story based on her own reality, and how much we really know about our parents. In the year of 2010, 58-year-old priest and father of three, Åke Roxberg comes out as Ann-Christine who today lives as a woman. This is the daughter Esther‘s story about what happens when you suddenly have a father named Ann-Christine.

What do we know about our parents? They’re never anything but parents. They do what parents do, listen but never speak. Help you up but they themselves stay down. One day you’ll start to wonder who they are. Those people who’ve always just been there. You realize that you don’t know what they’re thinking about in their beds at night. You don’t know what they dream about. Your memories don’t provide any answers, they can’t reveal their true selves. You’ve never wondered. There was never any reason to wonder, until now.

No one was prepared for the reality, that the priest and father of three Ake Roxberg would change his life, least of all the family.
Esther Roxberg writes about losing a parent, who still remains in a different guise. She tries to understand and accept, concealing his anger, put puzzles with their recollections. She remembers her childhood as the youngest and wildest daughter  of the priest and her childhood in Zimbabwe and Småland during a time when the secret was still hidden. Memories that now must be reviewed on its way to the new, no one knows how it will be. At the same time she is forces to a completely new family situation, where everything is as it used to be, yet nothing is the same.