Walk Me to the Corner

WALK ME TO THE CORNER ANNELI FURMARK, HANNA STROMBERG

Stability withers where passion blossoms in this cool-toned meditation on mid-life relationships. A loving home and husband; two grown sons; a lakeside cabin with a picnic table where their initials are carved; and the chance encounter with a woman at a party that destabilizes it all. Elise is in her mid-fifties and is satisfied with life. But the moment she sees Dagmar, she’s entranced. What begins as eye contact transitions to harmless texting, and quickly swells into the type of lust and yearning Elise did not know her life was lacking. Both happily married, there’s trepidation, but they can’t resist. The two arrange to meet, changing the course of Elise’s stable and consistent life forever. Though Elise’s husband attempts to support her exploration, he also begins an affair with a much younger woman—a postgraduate student in her thirties. The cliché of it all is too much for Elise to bear. As their marriage unravels, her love for Dagmar grows stronger. But with Dagmar content to stay in her marriage, Elise is stranded, adrift, completely alone for the first time in her adult life, and searching for someone to blame—the other woman. In the blur of a breakdown, she’s left facing the reality that, after all, she started it. In lush watercolour washes and pencil crayons, Anneli Furmark’s Walk Me to the Corner is a gorgeous portrait of desire and heartbreak, and the painful gamble the heart sometimes choses in spite of the mind. Translated from the Swedish by Hanna Stromberg

ANNELI FURMARK, HANNA STROMBERG

Anneli Furmark was born in 1962 and grew up in Luleå, Sweden. She studied at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, where she now occasionally teaches. A painter and comic artist, her first graphic novel The Mazes and Other Stories was published in 2002. She has since produced ten graphic novels and won the Urhunden Prize from the Swedish Comics Association for three of her books. Furmark’s work has been featured in numerous anthologies, and been published internationally as well as in several Swedish newspapers. The french edition of her book Red Winter was part of the Official Selection at the 2016 Angoulême International Comics Festival. Walk Me to the Corner is Anneli Furmark’s second book in English for Drawn & Quarterly. Translated from the Swedish by Hanna Strömberg