Where We Once Walked

If The Wednesday Club is Westö’s most accessible novel, Where We Once Walked is his most ambitious, and for many readers his masterpiece.

Why Read This

Winner of Finland’s Finlandia Prize in 2006, this multi-generational epic follows three Helsinki families from 1905 to 1944, threading them through the Finnish Civil War, the interwar years, and the opening of World War II. The 1918 Civil War, in which Reds and Whites fought a brutal conflict that left lasting scars on Finnish society, sits at the center of the book and shapes everything that follows. Westö is meticulous about class: how speech, address, and neighborhood divided people who lived metres apart in the same city.

At 509 pages, the novel demands patience, but it rewards that patience with a depth of world-building that is rare in contemporary literary fiction. If you want to understand what Helsinki was and what it cost to become what it is, this is the book.

What to Expect

A long, layered novel with a large cast and a wide time span. The prose is rich and the emotional register shifts from intimate to panoramic. Plan to give it several weeks. Readers who love Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels or Per Olov Enquist will find this operating at a similar level.