South of Forgiveness by Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger.

Trigger Warning:

This review discusses sexual assault, trauma, and the complex realities of forgiveness.

Few books demand as much of their readers: emotionally, morally, spiritually, as South of Forgiveness by Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger. It is a work that defies genre and expectation: part memoir, part reckoning, part dialogue between a survivor and the man who violated her. In what may well be a first in contemporary publishing, the book is co-authored by both victim and perpetrator, their voices woven together across continents as they travel from Iceland and Australia toward a single, fraught destination: truth.

The story traces the aftermath of Elva’s assault at age sixteen, committed by Stranger, who was then her boyfriend. After years of silence, years of unraveling the emotional and psychological wreckage, the two began exchanging emails; tentatively at first, then with increasing candour. This correspondence ultimately brought them face to face in Cape Town, South Africa, a neutral land where they attempted to confront the damage, name it plainly, and understand its reverberations in both of their lives.

The book does not flinch. Its pages move through shame, denial, cultural blindness, and the profoundly uneven terrain of accountability. It insists that rape is not an abstract moral failing but a devastating human act with lifelong consequences; and that the path toward any semblance of reconciliation begins not with absolution but with responsibility.

The collaboration itself has been controversial. At public appearances, audiences have walked out; some in solidarity with Elva, others in outrage at Stranger’s presence. It is difficult, unsettling work: to sit with both voices on the page, to witness the survivor’s grief and the perpetrator’s attempt at confession, repair, and understanding. On my first read, I could not bear Stranger’s entries. I skipped them entirely. I had no interest, no capacity, to hear his voice. That refusal was its own kind of self-protection.

But time complicates even our instincts. Returning to the book, I found myself confronting an uncomfortable truth: it requires no small courage - or perhaps no small reckoning - to narrate one’s own wrongdoing with unvarnished clarity. Stranger’s sections are not exculpatory; they are an admission of harm, a dismantling of the convenient myths that allow perpetrators to minimise their choices. Elva’s sections, meanwhile, are electric with intelligence and sorrow, shaped by the long labour of healing. Together, the two create a narrative that is painful, unsettling, and undeniably human.

For Christians, particularly, South of Forgiveness presses on theological fault lines. Christ’s call to forgive “seventy times seven” is both command and crucible. It does not discriminate between small grievances and devastating transgressions; it asks the believer to relinquish the right to vengeance, not in order to excuse wrongdoing, but to surrender the burden of bitterness. The book forces us to ask: Do we desire our pain more than we desire Christ? Do we cling to the safety of unforgiveness, or do we dare to let God walk with us through our wounds toward transformation?

Forgiveness, as this narrative makes clear, does not absolve. It does not erase trauma or negate justice. It does not let the offender “off the hook.” Instead, it frees the one who suffered to walk unencumbered by the corrosive weight of resentment. It is an act of spiritual untangling: a clearing of the heart so that what is not of Christ may fall away.

South of Forgiveness is not an easy read; nor should it be. It is painful, sobering, at times overwhelmingly sad. But it is also a testament to the radical possibility of healing and the arduous, often halting work of forgiveness. It challenges survivors, not with platitudes, but with the unsettling question of what it means to seek wholeness in a broken world. And it challenges all readers to consider the transformative, costly, and profoundly Christian act of forgiving without forgetting.

It is a book one finishes slowly, breath held, heart aching; yet somehow enlarged.

Click on the image to read one of our contributors’ honest account of her journey to forgive her rapist.