BREATHE

In Kravchenko’s debut novel, a man seeks to locate his friends in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami.

Carl Lundmark is a young Swedish man living in London who’s perpetually single and unhappily works hard at his hedge fund job to distract him from the emptiness of his life. Then he hears about an earthquake in the Indian Ocean on the news—a freak event that kicked up a tsunami that’s thought to have killed thousands in Southeast Asia. Carl’s recently married best friends,Kristoffer and Eva Berg, are in Thailand, which was one of the worst-hit areas: “Carl had exchanged texts with Kristoffer three days ago, or maybe four. They had landed in Bangkok, Kristoffer said….It was their honeymoon, for God’s sake. How could anything happen to them?” He manages to find the name of the resort where his friends were staying, only to learn that it was “all but obliterated” by the tsunami, and that Kristoffer and Eva are among the missing. He makes a spontaneous decision to fly to Thailand to try to find them, although he has no idea how he’ll do so. As Carl encounters the post-tsunami chaos on the ground, Kravchenko offers pre-tsunami stories of Kristoffer, Eva, and other tourists as their fates pull them toward the unforeseeable calamity. The prose is taut and vibrant, pulsing with Carl’s tense nervous energy: “Hospital staff…lifted a motionless woman from a stretcher that had been laid on the asphalt, and placed her on a trolley. Her hair and face were covered in dry blood and mud, her eyes closed, grimy arms spread, dangling.” The story manages to successfully balance the specific horrors of the 2004 tsunami with the personal lives of Carl, Kristoffer, and the others, resulting in a consistently surprising tale of friendship that delves into Swedish identity and questions of how best to live. There are a few moments of cultural analysis that feel clunky and didactic, but for the most part, the story is a page-turner with high psychological stakes.

A well-crafted disaster novel that packs an emotional wallop.