Winner of the Finlandia Prize
Winner of the Aleksis Kivi Prize

"In Pirkko's Helsinki, the personal and political are not collapsed but interlinked, and revolution is closely tied with sensuality. Idealistic young people rush, disguised in drab overcoats, to secret locations where coded knocks allow them inside to discuss the hot political topics of the day. And then, in those back rooms, private identities bloom... Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio's work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen."
--Niina Pollari, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A remarkable patchwork of narratives and literary devices in which every element is not only expertly expressed, but is a key player, baking up something of its own class entirely...The stories comprising The Red Book of Farewells are many things. They are poetries. They are critical and personally intimate experiences of Finnish LGBTQ history. They are love stories. They are stories of stepping in and out of one's skin. They are stories of motherhood, daughterhood, personhood, and stories of the gains and unforgettable losses of one's heart. They are multidimensional and oh-so-worthy of your full attention."
--Elizabeth Hoover, Delphic Reviews

"The Red Book of Farewells is an at times overwhelming work, its structure shifting focus and moving across different windows of time. It's also about the complex relationship between art and politics, and the challenges and hypocrisies of a society that advocates revolutionary politics while enforcing regressive social norms."
--Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

"Saisio revisits the dawning of her sexuality and her development as an actor and political activist life in this illuminating work of autofiction....There's plenty of charm in Saisio's free-flowing approach, as well as insights on her development as an artist."
--Publishers Weekly

"Dreamlike...A moving, uneasy, and artistic novel about growing up queer in a time of conflict."
--Foreword Reviews

"A beautifully rendered portrait of a strikingly queer life--Saisio troubles any distinction we might try to draw between the personal and the political, the remembered and the invented."
--Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere

"This Red Book of Farewells is also a book of welcoming: to life, to love, to death, to art, to revolution, to our ever-changing identities. It is hilarious and heartbreaking and like nothing I've ever read before."
--Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra

"Pirkko Saisio might be the best Finnish author alive. She is wise, profound, funny, erudite, an old and precise person, and of course a divine storyteller and a master of dialogue. On top of all that, she uses the Finnish language masterfully."
--Aamulehti (Finland)

"Saisio has had a major effect on the cultural atmosphere we live in."
--Aleksis Kivi Prize jury