A Q&A with Lisa Ridzén, Indies Introduce Author of the August Indie Next List Top Pick “When the Cranes Fly South”

Lisa Ridzén is the author of When the Cranes Fly South, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection, and the top pick for the August 2025 Indie Next List. 

While initially selected for the Winter/Spring 2025 season, the on-sale date for this title has since been pushed to August 19.

Randy Schiller of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri, served on the bookseller panel that selected Ridzén’s debut for Indies Introduce.

He said of the book, “One of the best novels, much less debut novels, that I’ve ever read. You’ll enjoy the best cry of your life!”

Randy Schiller: Hi, this is Randy Schiller. I’m a buyer at Left Bank Books in St Louis, Missouri.

I’m here today with Lisa Ridzén, who is a doctoral student in sociology, researching masculinity norms in the rural communities of the Swedish far north, where she herself was raised and now lives in a small village outside of Östersund. The idea of her debut novel came from the discovery of notes her grandfather’s care team had left the family as he neared the end of his life.

The book we’re going to talk about is When the Cranes Fly South. This is a story of Bo and the last months of his life. I don’t really want to describe it too much, because you kind of know from the beginning where it’s going to go, but also it’s a real joy to experience the trip. It’s not one you can consider having an understanding for, I think, until you go through it, which makes it very difficult to kind of describe. I’m going to just jump right into questions, if that’s okay, and we’ll learn more about the book as we talk.

So first, I’m making an assumption here about your research: a lot of that must involve technical writing and specifically about relationships between men, which is also very important to the book. Your prose in the book is beautifully written, it’s full of empathy and does not feel like technical writing in any way. And I’m just wondering if you find one way of writing easier than the other?

Lisa Ridzén: Thank you for that beautiful introduction! And you’re right. Writing academically and writing fiction are two different types of writing that come with different challenges and joys.

When I write academic texts, I need to be transparent. I need to clearly show how I think and show the reader how and why I come to different conclusions, right? And I want to be thought-provocative. Whereas when I write fiction, I want to let the reader be able to read in between the lines. I want to show and not tell. So, I don’t want to be as clear in that sense. But there is more room for feelings and emotions in fiction writing, right? I don’t mind if people that read my academic texts feel things when they read, but I mostly write for the brain when I write academic texts. When I write fiction, I write for the feelings, the emotions.

But I’ve also learned a lot through my research work when it comes to the technical aspects of writing. For instance, to be patient and to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and to let other people read your text, and never really be happy. You can always make a change and do something better, and also just work with big loads of text. For my PhD thesis, it’s a monograph, we say in Swedish — a book, basically. So, I brought a lot of experience from my research into my fiction writing.

When it comes to interviewing, I’ve done interviews for my research with people, with men that live in rural areas where I live, and this is a way of working that I use in my fiction writing too. So, I call my dad, or my best friend, or some neighbors. And when I talk to the village people around me and so on, I use certain ways of doing interviews that I’ve learned through my research.

RS: It just flows. It feels like it wasn’t very hard to write the novel — at least that’s the way the prose feels. And with the topic, I find that an amazing thing, actually. Thank you.

To talk about a little bit about your grandfather’s caretakers, I was just wondering about the character Ingrid. She stood out for me. To explain briefly: intermittently — after a lot of chapters — there’s a brief note from the caretakers who are checking on Bo every day. Ingrid stood out to me because she seemed the most invested in what she could do for him in a total way — not just making sure he was physically healthy. Was that based on someone that was on that log that your grandfather shared with you? Is it an amalgamation of people or just totally original?

LR: Yes, Ingrid exists, yes. I have changed her a little bit, of course, and some things have been made up completely. But when I wrote about the carer, I drew inspiration from when I worked myself in the home service — as it’s called in Swedish, hemtjänst.

Working as a home service person is quite a unique experience in the Swedish healthcare system. Visiting the elderly in their homes brings you into their daily lives in a way that other health departments don’t. You come into their daily lives, their homes, which are full of memories, experiences, and life. You get to meet their children, their pets, their partners, relatives, neighbors, and so on. And your role becomes much more than purely physical caring: showering or helping, fixing food or reminding them to take their medicine, or putting on compression socks — which is a very common thing that you do.

You become a very important part of their lives, and you gain an important social role, because many kids have moved away and they don’t live nearby anymore and so on. And the fact that these people are — unlike patients in most other healthcare settings — not going to recover, also gives a different scope to the relationship between the carer and the elderly. Many people will need help for years, so you really get to know them, you see them many times every day. Some people you look after for a month before they pass away.

These carers are so much more important to the elderly than we realize, and my own experience working in the home services is that aging also creates this certain need and tendency to reflect back on your life. This often means that when you come to the elderly it’s easy to fall into deep conversations — worries about dying, regrets and anxiety, unfinished businesses in different ways — because all of these thoughts are close to hand. There’s also something so vulnerable about their position, in their reliance on the carers for their very basic physical needs, so it’s natural for closeness to develop. I am also the kind of person who ends up in deep conversations with people, so that probably made that closeness even more prominent for me, with the elder people that I worked with.

Also, this kind of caring, the home services, is a fundamental part of aging in Sweden. Basically everyone goes through this system. It’s publicly funded, so you don’t pay much. Everyone is entitled to it, but it’s also a service under threat from funding cuts, and the work itself and the carers are probably as underrepresented in our culture, as the thoughts and emotions of all the men. So for me, writing about an old man’s perspective on life, it was extremely important to include the home services, hemtjänst.

RS: It’s a real — I don’t know if backbone of the book is the right way to say it — but I appreciated it as a reader.

That kind of leads into my next question, which is: At the beginning of the book, Bo’s son, Hans and his take on what should happen with Sixten the dog…Can Bo take care of his dog any longer?

It was very easy for me to be critical of Hans. But as the story progresses, as Bo’s recollections come back, and as I’m entering that period of my life where I’m going to have to take care of my parents in some form or fashion, I became a lot more understanding of his part as well.

Is that something going into writing the story you wanted to share, or is it just something that came out of writing the story?

LR: Well, like you say, the relationship does shift in the story, right? Bo loses control and self-determination, while Hans gains control and responsibility for his dad.

It can often be the most difficult to be truly open with our feelings and thoughts with those we love the most, especially in relationships that we haven’t chosen, such as with family. Even though relationships can be difficult and frustrating and hurtful, perhaps especially between fathers and sons, I felt it was important to try to capture the way that we are usually doing the best we can, right to the very, very end. Sometimes that is enough and sometimes it’s not, right? But I wanted it to be clear that Hans and Bo are doing their best to reach each other.

It was important that the feeling of ambiguity was allowed to be present in the story, that it wasn’t black or white, especially from Hans’ perspective. On the one hand, he doesn’t feel seen and respected by his father. He struggled with that his whole life, which is shown through their clashes over work, but also politically and emotionally, different ideals and choices that were made throughout life. On the other hand, he loves his father. He’s grateful for what Bo and his mother have given him throughout his life, and he wants to give Bo the very best end that is possible, and it hurts to see his father struggle.

When it comes to emotionality in the book, I wanted to portray how — this goes along with the ambiguity — multiple contradictory feelings can exist simultaneously within one person, and how our feelings may change over the day, over an hour, and over a year and a lifetime. Even the simplest things can be the hardest to say. For example, Bo really wants to tell Hans how proud he is. He tries to say it throughout the whole book. It was super frustrating to write. “Come on, Bo! You can do it!” It’s a simple and good emotion, right? You think that it should be easy, but a lifetime of normative training combined with the recurring conflicting aspects of the relationship get in the way. And in this sense, I was very inspired by my own father and grandfather. My grandfather told me how proud he was of my father and how well he’d done in life and so on, but he couldn’t tell my father that. But of course I did, and it made my dad happy. But there’s something that makes certain feelings really hard to express.

RS: I think that’s definitely felt throughout the book, and I like where it ends up, too. Part of that is personal, because I have a relationship with my father and I understand, I guess, the difficulties with men sharing.

LR: Yeah, and Bo, he’s got a defense mechanism. He often gets angry, or expresses harsh criticism, which has created a sense of inferiority and insufficiency in Hans. This shows how what you think and what you feel is not always what comes out through your mouth.

RS: Yeah. Another relationship which is not touched on much, but that is always there, is with Bo’s wife, Fredrika. I think it’s fairly obvious that she wouldn’t be a part of the story so much, at least in the now of the story. But I’m wondering about the choice you made. I guess I feel like it might have been very easy just to have her have died previously, prior to the story, but you chose differently. And I’m wondering if there was a reason.

LR: I’m not really sure, actually. When the whole story came to me, it was very finished. Bo was very finished. He basically — this sounds like a cliché — but he just spoke through me. I just needed to write down his words. And his wife had dementia.

If I analyze it, it might be because my granddad on my mom’s side suffered from dementia the last years of his life. I saw how much this affected my grandmother and my mom and her siblings, so maybe that’s why she got dementia. How hard it can be to find a new role for someone who’s still alive and physically well, but is just a completely different person…

And the whole book Bo talks to Fredrika, right? The story is told to his wife, and this is partly a simple way of showing how much he misses her, and how difficult it can be to lose your life partner. Even if she’s still alive, he kind of considers her to be gone. It was also a choice of narrative device intended to demonstrate the important place our loved ones often still hold in our thoughts and everyday lives, even after they’re physically gone.

For instance, I live in my grandfather’s house on my dad’s side. Even if it’s been 15 years since he passed, I still feel his presence. He’s still around, even if he’s not here with us any longer. I guess it’s a way of expressing Bo’s missing of his wife in the same way as I miss my granddad.

RS: It was a very effective choice and really adds to the story. The last chapter of the book is kind of hard for me to think about without experiencing it with the same kind of intensity I did the first time. I get really emotional about it. It’s so strongly written and ties things up in a way that — even though you know what’s happening —you can’t be ready for it. As much as it’s emotionally moving and a little bit difficult, it’s not a negative ending, even though it’s sad.

As a writer, writing a chapter about a person slipping into death, is that different from writing the rest of the book? Did you have to approach it differently? Were you able to just separate from it and write it as a writer?

LR: I don’t recall it being harder to write the final chapter than the rest of the book, since I knew how it was going to end when I started writing. I, in some sense, felt like finally Bo got some peace into his life. It’s hard not to give away, but I wanted to create a space for a sense of consolation, so you would feel like, “Oh, it’s gonna be okay.”

I also drew a lot of inspiration from when I have looked after people myself, the last hours of their life: this intermesh of practicality. How you look after a dying body from the home services perspective, but also give part to Bo’s thoughts and feelings. Often towards the end, people don’t talk so much, so you don’t really know what’s going on in there. But I imagined what would go on in my own head and in my granddad’s head.

My granddad passed away in this house in the middle of the night, just like Bo, with the one carer by his side. The little note that I finished the book with is basically exactly like it was for my granddad.

I don’t recall it being harder than the rest of the book, but I was sad.

RS: It’s one of my favorite final pieces of a book that I’ve read. Even knowing what was going to happen, it was still an unexpected feeling. The final characters make it somewhat difficult to read or to finish, but also, it adds to that sense of the peacefulness that maybe comes with it, with that last moment of life, your last moments of life. As emotional and as sad as it is, you still have a smile.

LR: Yeah. When I’ve been talking about the book with people in Sweden, I often get to hear that they feel this peacefulness and it’s sad, but it’s beautiful.

I think that there is a need — I don’t know what it’s like in America, but in Sweden — to talk more about dying and losing our loved ones. Sweden is a very secular society, so one aspect of that is that we never talk about death, and we just see this as this horrible thing. It is hard and horrible that we get separated from our loved ones, but it’s also such a natural thing of life. It doesn’t have to be awful. My granddad, for instance, died when he was 95 and he was very healthy his whole life, and very grateful. And, you know, it’s fine. So I wanted that to be in the final chapter, too.

RS:  And it does come across. And unfortunately, in America, we like quantity versus quality, and I think that’s true of our aging as well. We try to extend it, maybe too far sometimes. Is there anything else you’d like to share?

LR: I don’t think so. I’m very happy that you wanted to have me on this podcast. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, and I’m happy you liked the book!

RS: Thank you for joining us. It was wonderful talking with you as well.

LR: Thank you.

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When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén (Vintage, 9798217006731, Paperback Fiction, $18) On Sale: 8/19/2025.

Find out more about the author on Instagram at @lisaridzen.

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