Writer Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum grew up surrounded by words. As children, she and her sister enjoyed falling asleep to their mother’s voice as she read books before bed, and their father — a Lutheran pastor and poet — spent every Sunday working on his sermons, reciting the words aloud as he wrote. 

“Being around a writer, swimming in someone else’s language, was impactful,” says Lunstrum, who has published three collections of short stories including What We Do with the Wreckage, which won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Earlier this month, Lunstrum expanded her repertoire with the release of her first novel, Elita (published through Northwest University Press/TriQuarterly Books). The beautifully written work, set during a Seattle winter in 1951, is a Northwestern take on Nordic Noir.

“I love reading mysteries,” Lunstrum says, “and because I was trained in literary fiction, I had this sense of mysteries as a ‘guilty pleasure’ because they are often lumped in with genre fiction. I set out to write a mystery that didn’t hinge on violence against women and girls. As much as I love mystery, I wanted to avoid that. I didn’t quite succeed, but the plot is based on the appearance of a girl rather than her disappearance.”

Elita starts with Bernadette Baston — a university lecturer and scholar of child language acquisition and development — listening to a recorded police interview with two men (prison guards at the fictional Puget Sound island, Elita) who first found a girl alone near the woods. Called Atalanta by those caring for her, she cannot speak and is being cared for by a team of caregivers at the prison. Bernadette is brought in on the case in the hopes that she will make a language breakthrough with Atalanta, as no one knows her real name, her family ties, or where she came from. As she becomes more involved and meets residents on Elita’s sister island, Adela, Bernadette — the single mother of a spirited young daughter, Willie — finds herself increasingly entangled in a mysterious web of local lore, suspicious individuals, and the unannounced arrival of her estranged husband from the east coast. Pulled between motherhood and her career, Bernadette struggles to find success in a male-dominated world, ultimately realizing that “the entire system of society is set up to stop her from freeing herself.”

This balance between children and a career is one that Lunstrum feels deeply. Born in Chicago, her family moved to Washington when she was an infant, and she spent her first nine years in the Edmonds area before her parents relocated to the Midwest for a handful of years. “We moved back to Washington when I was in high school,” the writer says. “We lived in Bellingham and then Monroe.” Lunstrum and her partner, now husband, lived around the country for nearly 15 years as he attended grad school, and she taught creative writing. They landed in New York for four years, where she got a job at the State University of New York at Purchase. “And then we had babies,” Lunstrum says. “When my youngest was born, we lived in a little apartment in New York, and I was teaching. It was totally untenable and very expensive to have two little ones in an apartment with no help. We were literally swapping children in the parking lot so I could teach.”

In 2012 the family “jumped ship” from New York, returning to the Northwest, where Lunstrum’s family still lived. And just a few chapters in, it’s obvious that Elita was written by someone who resides and has deep roots in the area. The descriptions of the landscape — waterways during ferry rides, forests, beaches, and island farms — are enough to set the reader right in the scene, all the while capturing the enigmatic gloom of the region’s winter, which is a fitting setting for a mystery. Lunstrum wrote Elita over 10 months in the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time she and her husband purchased a 24-foot, 1980s sailboat and, along with their two children and dog, started exploring the Puget Sound.

“I saw it in a way I never had before,” Lunstrum says. “So many of the waterways, islands, and hidden pieces of the landscape here appeared unused. During this time we discovered the story of McNeil Island, which, despite growing up in Washington, I had not heard about. I started researching the history more deeply, and the setting for the novel came about.”

Elita is a tightly written page-turner that despite its midcentury setting, gives its female characters (young and old) a lot of agency over their actions and feelings. Lunstrum constructs a very truthful picture of womanhood, its internality, and the daily struggles that women go through just to be heard — let alone taken seriously.

“I think a lot of my experience of working motherhood is in this book,” she says. “I have the benefit of a partner who is coparenting and contributing to our household, but despite the difference in our era and our support networks, there are a lot of similarities. Bernadette’s feelings on being on the outside in academia are something I truly did feel, and I think the tensions I put into the book are real for most mothers: Loving and wanting to be with your child while also experiencing a constant draw towards what motherhood pulls you away from.”

On Jan. 30, Kirsten Sundberg Lundstrom will be in conversation with Tara Conklin and Kristen Millares Young at Elliott Bay Books. Details here.