The publisher's blurb for this book tells us to expect a "Shakespearean drama", and while it is hardly that, to describe The Brothers as Turgenevian wouldn't be an overstatement.

This simple and affecting story set at the start of the 19th century is recounted from different perspectives by eight characters who inhabit or visit a tenanted farm in desolate western Finland. The country is recovering from the recent war between Russia and Sweden, and the fateful world in which the narrators move, and their prostration, is indicative of the state of a nation used as a battleground between two empires. The pine forests crowd menacingly around and the inhabitants seem powerless in the face of the elements: free will doesn't feature in this outpost of "inescapable" givens.

The two brothers of the title, Henrik and Erik, grow up together on the farm. While local landowners live in luxury, the peasant farmers struggle to eke out a meagre living, racked by "hungers that eating won't cure" and wishing they were elsewhere; intense hatreds trickle through this short novel like meltwater.

As a young man the impetuous Henrik develops a destructive obsession with a neighbour's horse, and will do anything to own it. The animal grows into an unruly stallion that "smells of a graveyard" and becomes a malignant symbol pervading the book. When a promise is broken and Henrik loses what he most desires, and then loses a woman, he runs away to St Petersburg. Inevitably the brothers end up pitted against each other on opposing sides during the war.

Returning to seek his revenge, Henrik's plans are thrown into disarray when a usurping relative takes over the farm in the same cunning fashion as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, forcing out all the tenants. News of their destitution is greeted with dour resilience – "things just happen sometimes". We wouldn't have wanted it any other way.