The Phantom Carriage

• New English translation

• Critical introduction

• 24 illustrations

What if the last person to die before the new year began were handed the reins of Death's cart, and bound to drive it from house of death to house of death for a year that stretches out like a hundred? That is the bargain at the heart of Selma Lagerlöf's The Phantom Carriage, and once you have heard it you will not easily set it down.

On New Year's Eve in a Swedish town, David Holm sits among the gravestones drinking beer and telling two tramps the legend of the cart — the one-eyed horse, the rusty scythe, the driver with blue-black lips — a story he tells for the pleasure of frightening them and does not believe. Above him, in a small house, a young Salvation Army sister lies dying of the illness she caught at her post, and asks for him by name. At home his wife waits out the night, worn past endurance by the man she married. When the clock strikes twelve, the tale David has been telling closes over him, and he is carried on a long ride through the consequences of everything he has done.

This edition offers a literary translation made to be read now: natural and alive in the language of its readers, faithful to the substance, the voice, the tone and the images of Lagerlöf's original. The supernatural machinery here is exact and unsentimental, the moral accounting exacting, and the single night it describes moves fast and dark.

The volume opens with a critical introduction, placed before the author's text, that sets out the legend behind the story, the world of the slum station and its people, and the strange, severe logic of Death's employment.

Add The Phantom Carriage to your library, and let it keep you company through the turning of a year.