Book Review: A Novel’s Extraordinary Protagonist Is So Poor She Steals Toilet Paper from a Library

Anu Kolmonen’s novel presents an unusually forceful portrait of poverty, one the reviewer believes literary prize juries should notice.

Kolmonen is a writer and visual artist from northern Ostrobothnia who also cares for her mother. The review describes her book as testimony grounded in lived reality.

Literature readers repeatedly search for depictions of poverty, much as they search for working-class writing during every book season. The reviewer suggests that this search often begins with a prior assumption: that contemporary literature contains little poverty or working-class life, only polished middle-class experience.