Companions

Translated by Paul Russell Garrett

Camilla, Charles, Alma, Edward, Alwilda and Kristian are a circle of friends hurtling through mid-life. Structured as a series of monologues jumping from one friend to the next, Companions follows their loves, ambitions, pains and anxieties as they age, fall sick, have affairs, grieve, host dinner parties and move between the Lake District, Berlin, Lisbon, Belgrade, Mozambique, New York and, of course, Denmark. In her first book to be translated into English, Christina Hesselholdt explores everyday life, the weight of the past and the difficulty of intimacy in a uniquely playful and experimental style. At once deeply comic and remarkably insightful, Companions is an exhilarating portrait of life in the twenty-first century.

‘Wonderfully rich prose, what a precious companion.’
— Helle Helle, author of This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

‘Christina Hesselholdt is among the Danish writers who now occupy the very top rank. Her prose is lively, luminous, engaging, and fascinating.’
— Kristeligt Dagblad

‘Hesselholdt has never been better. Humour and grief go hand in hand, and the language shimmers from the drily caustic to the tenderly casual to the breathtakingly erotic.’
— Berlingske Tidende

‘I am quite certain that this book will do something to Danish literature. Hesselholdt is part of a generation of remarkable female authors who had their breakthroughs at the beginning of the 1990s and who in the past decade have turned their writing in new and surprising directions. None of them has moved to as wild and, yes, as promising a place as Hesselholdt has come to now.’
— Information

Christina Hesselholdt, born in 1962, studied at the Danish Academy of Creative Writing in Copenhagen. Her first novel, Køkkenet, Gravkammeret & Landskabet [The Kitchen, the Tomb & the Landscape], was published in 1991. She has written fifteen books of prose, and received critical acclaim and awards for her books, including the Beatrice Prize in 2007 and the Critics’ Prize in 2010. She was included in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2013. Companions is her first book to appear in English. Her latest work, Vivian, a novel about the photographer Vivian Maier, was published by Rosinante in 2016. It won the Danish Radio Best Novel Award 2017 and has been shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2017.

Paul Russell Garrett translates from Danish and Norwegian. He serves on the management committee of the Translators Association and is Programme Director for a new theatre translation initiative, [Foreign Affairs] Translates!