Description
Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, tove feels that her childhood is made for a completely different girl. As ‘long, mysterious words begin to crawl across My soul’, she comes to understand that she has a vocation that will define her life. Her path seems assured, but she has no idea of the struggles ahead – love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the Central tension of tove’s life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly – as an artist on her own terms.
Review
Mordant, vibrantly confessional… A masterpiece ― Guardian
Semi-miraculous, raw and poignant … Radiates the clear light of truth and stands as the ultimate victory of a life that must have felt, in the living of it, like a defeat — Alex Preston ― Observer
Intense, elegant … Ditlevsen’s portrait of Vesterbro in the Twenties has something of the same texture of Elena Ferrante’s description of the poor Neapolitan neighbourhood in which her heroines grow up — Lucy Scholes ― The Daily Telegraph
Wrenching sadness and pitch-black comedy … Sharp, tough and tender — Boyd Tonkin ― Spectator
A particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. Ditlevsen’s voice, diffident and funny, dead-on about her own mistakes, is a welcome addition to that canon of women who showed us their secret faces so that we might wear our own. ― New York Times
Intense and elegant … an absolute tour de force — Lucy Scholes ― Paris Review
A stunning portrait of addiction and ambition . . . unnervingly brilliant. I felt an almost physical pull to reimmerse myself in the freezing cold water of the trilogy, which understands the trauma of childhood and its reverberations like nothing else I have ever read ― Vox
Reviews
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