Three literature students are housemates in an apartment they’ve nicknamed Campo. There’s Helga, the narrator; Rosie, who waitresses on the side; and Sambre, the most charismatic of the three, who calls the tune. They are soon joined by Anders. A libertarian spirit blows through their offbeat home until the day Sambre slams the door on her way out, and disappears without a word. Her departure signs a death sentence for Campo, and for their youth in general. The three abandoned friends throw themselves into their work and adult lives as though they were throwing jumping off a cliff. A question runs through the whole book – in which Sambre’s unexplained disappearance is both the starting point and the narrative thread: how do you invent a life? How do you survive reality when your youthful ideals had been so intoxicatingly powerful? A joyful book, bursting with sap and life, that comes to us straight from the old world, like a balm for the Covid castaways we have become.