Why You'll Love This
A tarot-like card spread sent an 18th-century bureaucrat chasing love across revolutionary Stockholm — and the cards were never wrong.
- Great if you want: historical intrigue laced with mysticism and political conspiracy
- The experience: richly atmospheric and leisurely paced — a book to sink into slowly
- The writing: Engelmann weaves fortune-telling structure directly into the narrative architecture
- Skip if: a 3.44 average signals this one genuinely divides readers
About This Book
Set in Stockholm in 1791, on the eve of a political revolution that will shake the Swedish court to its foundations, this novel follows Emil Larsson, a comfortable customs official whose ordered life is upended by a fortune-teller's prophecy. She lays out an Octavo for him—a spread of eight cards representing eight souls whose fates are intertwined with his own. What begins as a personal quest for love and belonging quietly expands into something far larger: conspiracy, loyalty, and the question of whether a single life can alter the course of history. The stakes are intimate and epic at once.
Engelmann writes with the lush precision of someone who has genuinely fallen in love with her period, and the card-reading framework gives the novel an unusual structural elegance—each character feels like a discovery rather than a convenience. The prose has a period formality that never tips into stuffiness, and the world of candlelit parlors, coded society, and political intrigue feels entirely inhabited. Readers who want their historical fiction to carry genuine atmosphere and a hint of the mystical will find this one quietly hard to put down.