Winter 2021 Scandinavian Reading Group

An unnamed 16-year-old girl lives with her unnamed mother in a flat above a hairdresser’s in a small Danish town. Their home is ‘not much to look at from the outside’ – and nor, at first glance, are their lives. The girl goes to school, frets over a German exam, drinks cider with friends, starts sixth form, goes to parties, meets boys; her mother runs a local shop, eats packed lunch with her friend Palle, tidies up after her daughter, chats and laughs with her. Made privy to tiny details of their lives but largely shut out from their thoughts, the reader is gradually drawn into the warmth and intimacy of their relationship – and the melancholy that slowly builds beneath the surface as they face, but do not talk about, the shadow that falls over their existence.

‘Helle Helle describes what people say and do, but not their feelings, and it is precisely
through this particular iceberg technique that she suggests emotions and relationships
between people in an extremely precise manner.’ From the citation for Helle Helle’s
nomination for the 2019 Nordic Council Literature Prize.

You can watch an interview with Helle Helle, in which she discusses her approach to writing De, here.

Milde is a young woman from the Outskirts, a place inhabited by dispossessed mothers and children who have been exiled from the City. Stripped of rights, they scrabble a precarious living scavenging junk from the city dump and selling trinkets to tourists. After Milde and two friends fire-bomb government buildings in the City, she is accused of being the brains behind the uprising. She is arrested, imprisoned, tortured and eventually offered a stark choice: face execution in the City or be sent into a black hole as part of a research project.

Gripping, moving and highly political, Event Horizon is a novel about oppression, exile, solidarity, trauma and loss. Balsam Karam writes about a community that refuses to be cowed, and a young woman’s stubborn faith in the possibility of a better world. The novel charts Milde’s course from rebellious child to leader of an uprising to prisoner in a fractured narrative that gives the last word to the rebels.

‘The novel asks me if I truly know what and who exist on the fringes of our society at this exact moment, and where “home” is if you don’t have the right documents.’ Borås Tidning.

‘I’m 35. I don’t want children. This isn’t something I talk about with other people. It’s something I’m ashamed of’. The narrator in Linn Strømborg’s novel has a life she loves with Philip, her partner of eight years. She’s always known she doesn’t want to have children, and Philip was fine with that when they got together. But now that everyone else is starting families – including her two best friends – his resolve seems to be wavering. Nagged by a mother desperate for grandchildren, surrounded on all sides by other people’s young families, increasingly distant from Philip and besieged by intrusive questions about her lack of children, it becomes ever more challenging for her to stand firm in her decisions and choices. Told in vignettes from her life and relationships, the novel offers a rare, touching insight into a life of chosen childlessness and the pressures it entails.

‘Strømsborg explores motherhood through the narrator’s relationship with her own mother, her grandparents and her mother’s relationship with her parents. […] The story is elegantly composed, at times cinematic. Strømsborg has written rare and energized prose about a timely and somewhat taboo topic.’ VG