The year is 1953 and the polio epidemic is raging. Ella-Kristin, training to be a nurse, gets to practice at the fully booked hospital in Ekstad. She worries about her fiancé Carl whose medical knowledge is tested by the decease. It’s going to be a fall when many lives are shattered and healthy young people are affected.

In the gallery of characters we also meet Nancy Brandh, the wife of one of the doctors, who prefers spending her time trying out new dresses at Drott, the town’s most exclusive designers store. And Kåre Hjelm, chief of the epidemic ward. And Ulla and Gittan, last year students at the girls school.

There is Still Hope is the first part in the series The Hospital, where we will meet the people around the small town hospital. It’s a world filled with excitement and seriousness, depicted with a great deal of time markers and nostalgia. Readers will get to follow the characters in joy and sorrow, in prosperity and adversity.

There is Still Hope is a constantly intriguing and thorough portrayal of the sometimes dramatic everyday life in a Swedish town in the fifties. With the hospital as the center hub, Karin Wahlberg paints a multifaceted picture of Sweden from the postwar period to the present day.