Katinka Rabe: Kirja lapsesta

A child is born in an ancestral manor whose patriarch remakes a decayed estate into a Palladian-style wooden palace, furnishing it in dark red and cultivating elaborate gardens of topiary, temples and winding drives. His obsessive pursuit of beauty reshapes the surrounding wilderness with wide carriage roads and theatrical landscape features, while the house becomes a hub of constant entertainments—hunting, concerts, masked evenings and lavish visitors. The narrative follows family life and the child's upbringing amid ceremonial architecture, material opulence and recurring rituals, exploring how inherited spaces, aesthetic ambition and social spectacle define domestic identity and the border between cultivated artifice and the untamed forest.