The Library Recommends

Novel (Danish) Charlotte Weitze: Rosarium, 2021 This three-part family novel follows a sibling couple fleeing into the woods during World War II, a transgender botanist with a fascination for a very special rose and a girl who can live off sunlight because she was born with green grains in her skin. Everyone has the different […]

Novel (Danish) Helle Helle: Bob, 2021 Welcome back to Helle’s very special minimalist writing style, where simple sentences are boiled down to the bone without losing meaning, but where you need fill in yourself. The main character from the previous novel De (2018) is here an open-minded narrator who lovingly and insightfully tells about life seen through the eyes […]

Novel (Danish) Christina Hesselholdt: Feje blade sammen op mod vinden, 2020   How do you deal with the desperation and grief of our dying world and the abuse of its creatures? How do you live as a (middle) aging with the memory of and longing for the now deceased family members, the voids they have […]

Novel (Danish and Swedish) Caroline Albertine Minor: Hummerens skjold, 2020   Have you been in touch with the other side today? Hummerens skjold (The lobster’s shield) punctures the mouthpiece between the living and the dead and asks what the two “states” can do for each other. The question begins the novel and ends it. Along […]

Novel (Danish) Stine Askov: Katalog over katastrofer, 2020 This is a very captivating novel about young Helle, who lives a very special life with her father. On a dilapidated farm, he trains her under strict discipline to cope with the final catastrophe of the 1980s, when the fear of nuclear power and war threatens. The […]

Novel (Danish) Jesper Stein: Rampen, 2020 A skilled crime writer has made a beautiful and well-written novel about his childhood, youth and adulthood seen and understood in the light of his parents’ marriage and divorce, which throws the young Jesper into a desperate relationship with the bitter and depressed mother, Jytte, who is abandoned by […]

Novel (Danish) Lotte Garbers: Løbeklubben i Saudi, 2020 The main character Maiken takes us to a completely different women´s life in Saudi Arabia, perhaps the world’s most conservative country, where Arab women’s rights are minimal and men’s wealth and dictatorial power rule the country where the author herself has lived. Maiken travels to the capital […]

Novel (Danish and Greenlandic) Niviaq Korneliussen: Blomsterdalen, 2020 An important, young Greenlandic voice wants to and must be heard: Niviaq writes empathetically about being on the road and having a hard time finding a foothold and home. A Greenlandic, gay anthropology student travels hopefully to Aarhus, but can not find herself among the Danes and […]

Novel (Swedish and Faroese) Mikael Niemi: Koka björn, 2017 It is the summer of 1852 in the small village Kengis in the northernmost part of Sweden. The Sami boy Jussi and his mentor, the local priest, investigate a gruesome murder and while most think the unfortunate victim was killed by a bear, Jussi and the […]

Novel (Danish) Tine Høeg: Tour de chambre, 2020 The author does not use much punctuation in this novel either but leaves line breaks and short sentences as images of thoughts and conversations about life seen through the young writer Asta who lives in college and dates hopeless guys while she is reluctantly fascinated by and […]

Novel (Danish) Henning Jensen: Gennem glasvæggen, 2020 The well-known and award-winning actor openly and honestly showcases the darkest and most life-changing experiences of his life: as a 36-year-old, successful but overworked royal actor, he steps through the glass wall of the real world towards the abyss of the mind, while a year of turbulent descent […]

Novel (Danish)  Stine Pilgaard: Meter i sekundet, 2020  An entertaining story about a young woman and new mother who, as an appendix to her folk high school teacher-boyfriend in a small Jutland town, is challenged and subtly provoked by the province, its forms of conversation, and habits. The modern big city woman feels overlooked and leftover […]

Novel (Danish) Kirsten Thorup: Indtil vanvid, indtil døden, 2020 A gruesome story of the encounter with madness and death under very special fanatic conditions. Danish Harriet leaves her two small children in Denmark in 1942 to seek relief from her grief as a widow when her husband is shot down over the Eastern Front in […]

Novel (Danish) Iben Mondrup: Tabita, 2020 Five-year-old Tabita and her younger brother are torn up and adopted by business manager Bertel and his wife in the 1960s when the Danish couple after some years of living Greenland moves back to Denmark. The little Greenlandic girl longs terribly for home and finds only comfort in her […]

Anne Cathrine Bomann: Agathe, 2019 An aging and unengaged psychiatrist counts the days until his retirement, while humming well-rehearsed comments to his patients on the therapeutic divan. The burned-out psychiatrist is about to fall, as he wakes up from his anxiety about not being able to make a difference, and in particular heal a very […]

Novel (Danish) Dy Plambeck: Til min søster, 2019 A novel about being a woman and being seen and understood – or not. Historian Aya is abandoned by her boyfriend and gives birth to her daughter as she researches a well-known late author’s childhood sweetheart and tries to see and understand her role for his authorship […]

Novel (Danish) Hanne Højgaard Viemose: HHV, FRSHWN Dødsknaldet i Amazonas, 2019 A fragmentary and wild novel about Danish Hanne’s experiences, thoughts and a troubled mind in respectively Denmark, the Amazons and Iceland, about her life with the occasionally psychotic Icelandic ex-husband and their amazingly inventive children, about her rough young adult experiences with love in […]

Short stories (Danish) Thomas Korsgaard: Tyverier, 2019 15 short stories about secrecy, loneliness, and hope seen in the eyes of different people, for example about having their past revealed in front of a post office worker, about fleeing a family lunch after the truth has been revealed, about trying to sell insurance to a dying, […]

Crime novel (Norwegian, translated into Danish) Helene Uri: Sort is, 2019 Read a captivating story of a home confined elderly couple – locked in because the winter cold has made it dangerous to go out on the slippery black iced sidewalks, but also locked inside a marriage where an intense drama lurks just below the […]

Crime novel (Danish) Niels Krause-Kjær: Mørkeland, 2019 Just before the parliamentary elections, this political crime novel takes the life of a government clerk. An elderly, experienced journalist and newly-educated young trainee are on the verge of extensive fraud committed by a secret circle of politicians and government officials who see themselves as the resistance movement […]

Novel (Danish) Maren Uthag: En lykkelig slutning, 2019 A truly different family chronicle of the work of seven generations of undertakers, one undertaker more special than the other. Nicholas loves corpses but knows that it is socially and culturally unacceptable. Looking back on his family history, each generation’s bizarre tendencies unfold in the face of […]

Memoir novel (Danish) Malene Lei Raben: Fruen, 2019 How to live a life when as a child you loved your strong and freedom-seeking mother through the youth rebellion in the 1970s, then as a young woman you are left in the throes of the same ambitious, troublesome and egocentric mother who clearly shows that she […]

Novel (Danish) Merete Pryds Helle: Nora, 2019 The novel is one of three Nordic reinterpretations of Henrik Ibsen’s plays – here a reinterpretation of Et dukkehjem (1879). The young and in love woman, Nora breaks up from her father’s house and marries Torvald, gives birth to a child and submits to the increasing depression of […]

Crime novel (Danish) Katrine Engberg: Vådeskud, 2019 This book is the fourth in the series about the police investigative team Jeppe Kørner and Anette Werner as well as the helpful, retired literature professor Esther De Laurenti. A new disappearance case annoys the police investigators and lurks to the reader’s dismay as a teenage boy disappears […]

Novel (Norwegian and translated into Danish) Johanna Frid: Nora eller brænd Oslo brænd, 2019 A Scandinavian novel about jealousy that takes place between the young love couple Swedish Johanna and Danish Emil and the latter’s ex-girlfriend Norwegian Nora. The ex-girlfriend is all that Johanna is not: beautiful, photogenic and popular on social media. When Emil […]

Novel (Finnish, translated into Danish) Selja Ahava: Før min mand forsvinder, 2019/ Ennen kuin mieheni katoaa, 2017 An auto fictional novel about getting emotionally lost when one’s husband through ten years of marriage suddenly one morning declares: “In reality, I’ve always wanted to be a woman.” Read a very empathizing first-hand account of perplexity, confusion, […]

Non-fiction literature on painting art (Danish) Annette Rosenvold Hvidt and Gertrud Oelsner: Vilhelm Hammershøi – på sporet af det åbne billede, 2018 Read a very thorough review of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s life from an art and cultural-historical perspective. Painter Hammershøi is one of the best known Danish painters in the world and stands out from his […]

Novel (Danish) Karen Fastrup: Hungerhjerte, 2018 Memoir novel An amazing memoir novel about the author and translator Karen’s own life of living like a crazy bullet, having a wild animal inside her, and in between behaving insanely. About a difficult childhood with a complicated father, loss of a younger brother, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts that […]

Non-fiction literature on women life (Danish) Renée Toft Simonsen: Jeg er f*cking hot, 2018 A personally written book for you who, like the author, is around 50 and experiences hormone changes in the same way as when you were a teenager – or for those who just want to gain insight into women’s menopause, emerging […]

Crime novel (Danish) Søren Svejstrup: Kastanjemanden, 2018 The two police investigators from the Copenhagen Police’s Department of Homicide, the young and ambitious Naia Thulin and the career-parked Mark Hess with the sad past, are busy getting back on track with an otherwise completed investigation into the alleged murder of the Minister of Social Affairs. The […]

Novel (Danish) Lotte Kaa Andersen: Syv sind, 2018 The final book in the romantic trilogy about life among the upper class after the financial crisis at one of Denmark’s richest addresses in Hellerup north of Copenhagen. We are not only invited into the pretty surface with beautiful, luxuriant and flowering gardens and large mansion villas […]