The overnight ferry from Riga to Stockholm is cheap, which is why it fills with young people getting away from their parents, and it supplies karaoke, an evening show with a flamboyant dance number, gambling halls, a lottery and a disco. Raudsepa uses the crossing as a figure for the space between being a teenager and being an adult: the entertainment is clichéd and sometimes absurd, and its banality matches the awkwardness of the passage. Outside, the sea is magnificent and also a vast nothingness that could swallow the whole party. What the book carries is nostalgia for a present about to become the past.