Sunday’s Child

Sunday’s Child by Ingmar Bergman is a poignant autobiographical novel centered on eight-year-old Pu Bergman, a Sunday’s child believed to possess special sensitivities like clairvoyance and ghost-seeing, during a transformative summer in rural Sweden. Eagerly awaiting his distant pastor father at the train station, Pu grapples with familial tensions, including parental arguments, his bullying older brother, encounters with death and aging, and ghostly tales from servants, all unfolding over 24 hours and culminating in a poignant train journey with his father. Interwoven with flashbacks to the future where an adult Bergman reflects on his dying father, the narrative explores complex father-son bonds, childhood innocence lost amid marital discord, and themes of time, memory, and reconciliation in Bergman’s characteristic introspective style.