When Anna von Hausswolff was young, her parents used to tell her stories about a place the family loved to visit. The location is seeped in a complicated history: a home, for example, to Sweden’s traditional folk music, it’s an area of outstanding natural beauty, but once provided the backdrop for a momentous uprising against the country’s king during which thousands of peasants were slaughtered, leaving its landscapes bathed in blood. The tales in which von Hausswolff lost herself – some true, some less so – were on occasions charming, at other times horrifying, but they always lingered long after bedtime. It became, to her, a place of mystery, magic and terror, and, though she won’t say where it is, she still returns repeatedly, if sometimes only in her imagination. She calls the place miraculous.