What does cold feel like? 38 degrees minus kind-of-cold. Like on New Year’s Eve when you’re waiting for a bus that never comes, because they don’t run on bank holidays. Like a long walk in thin tights, that forces you to thaw out your frozen veins in the bath in the middle of the night. Like Hemingway about to die.
Karla is longing to escape, to head south, to the city or any other place where it isn’t so dark and freezing cold. She wants to go to a place where her dog Hemingway isn’t ill and doesn’t need to be put down. To save her dog, Karla runs away from home with two of her friends. They’re heading south, towards the Mediterranean. A new life awaits them there. They make their way through the snowy Swedish landscape on buses and by hitching lifts. They sleep in tents, go to crazy parties with total strangers and when they’re running low on cash, they have a brilliant idea to hijack a bus.
Lova Lakso’s fast-paced story about Karla and her friends, desperate to flee their miserable and bitterly cold home town, is like a crazy road movie with lots of twists and turns, where you never quite know what will happen along the way.