It's a sweltering summer's day, and Anja Aropalo is on her way home with two errands in mind: first, to water the roses, and then to commit suicide.

She is slowly losing her husband to Alzheimer's disease, and she has made him a terrible promise - one she's not sure she can keep.

For Anja's niece, Mari, death is a teenage fantasy of grieving family and eternal beauty, an escape from the dullness of her life. But the adventure she longs for seems to come within reach when she begins a relationship with her charismatic teacher, Julian. His six-year-old daughter, Anni, is a witness to their blossoming affair, observing the lies and truths of those around her as she tries to discover what it is to be an adult.

The Limit draws together these four people, all struggling to work out where their boundaries lie. In vivid, incandescent prose, Riikka Pulkkinen reveals how our limits can show us who we really are.

Riikka Pulkkinen was born in 1980 and studied literature and philosophy at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of True, which was published in seventeen countries and shortlisted for the 2010 Finlandia Prize for Fiction. The Limit, her debut novel, was a bestseller in Finland and the Netherlands, and won the Kaarle and Laila Hirvisaari prizes.