Overview

Following a number of moves from one shabby rental to another, they—the mother and daughter of this elusive, strangely riveting novel set in 1980s Denmark—now reside in an apartment over the hairdresser shop in the same island town where they’ve always lived. It’s only ever been the two of them, and they are so enmeshed that it can be hard to tell them apart: they share the same manners, habits, and opinions to an almost comic degree. (“The shrubberies are dotted with crocuses, they don’t care for crocuses.”) One day the mother feels a lump in her throat, and, as our young heroine reflects, “nothing’s the way it is.” While the mother is in and out of the hospital, the daughter—barely sixteen and just starting high school—makes new friends (Tove Dunk, Hafni, Bob, and Desert Boots) and meets a few boys, but she remains essentially alone. In its splintering, multi-layered, perpetual present tense, where the borders of time seemingly expand, flatten, and dissolve, Helle finds an unexpectedly moving voice for her heroines' pain, one which rises almost wordlessly to the surface of the prose, to then reach across and profoundly touch the reader. A poignant coming-of-age story and a comedy of errors, they is also a billet-doux to the fashions and fads of the island of Lolland, Helle’s childhood home: she painstakingly records  what people wore, how they spoke, and the kinds of things they ate (“cauliflower gratin” and “macaroni horns in the tomato soup”). Gorgeously rendered into English by the prize-winning translator Martin Aitken, they is an exquisite small-town portrait—oblique, calibrated, and oddly affecting—of the love between a mother and daughter, of all its attendant longing, and the inevitable letting go. 

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9780811239127

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Reviews

""Helle has enchanting gifts as a storyteller… an immediacy that tenderly and consistently compels."" -- The New York Times ""One of my favorite Danish writers—she’s the master."" -- The Guardian ""Helle Helle’s minimalism isn’t boring; it crackles with mystery. It’s the every day, and yet it’s insistently beautiful."" -- Weekendavisen ""Helle Helle's They sharply renders the startling and singular specifics of a life: hairspray, glass trolls, radiators, crocheted curtains, shrimps, baguettes, liver pâté, harem pants, peacoats, denim skirts, the selling of milk, eggs and soap, fried eggs, pineapple, peaches and cheese, garlic, condensed milk, jam, terry-cloth, lemonade, female guitarists, cans of tomato soup, Band-Aids, rustic whole grain bread, cold spaghetti. All this within the binary star gravitational pull of a mother-daughter relationship peering into the void of the mother's sudden, almost certainly terminal, illness. It's a book about class, memory, and the texture of time itself. I'm now a Helle Helle completist."" -- Rita Bullwinkel ""Lyrical and understated. Readers will relish this simple tribute to the preciousness of days spent with loved ones."" -- Publishers Weekly ""The grammar of Danish writer Helle's sentences, a sort of not-quite present sense conveys extraordinarily well the sense of small-town life where experiences repeat so frequently they might almost be timeless... Almost everything one expects from a novel has been left out, yet nothing is missing."" -- Michael Autrey - Booklist ""Helle Helle's they is a deceptively slight, minimalist novel that packs a huge emotional punch in its superb translation from Danish by acclaimed translator Martin Aitken. Each austere sentence brings a wealth of information about the mother-daughter relationship at the center of the narrative. Helle is an exquisite stylist who details both the sensory surfaces of life and the intimacy inherent in any interaction."" -- Elizabeth DeNorma - Shelf Awareness ""Equally attuned to mundanity and morality, they is a novel suffused with a daily grace, documenting the cozy details of mother and daughter's life, the small pleasures of cheese toast and comfy clothes, and the way dread thrums alongside dailiness, each giving the other a different cast."" -- Meghan Racklin - Brooklyn Rail ""Strangely, wonderfully absorbing... Slow your heart, slow your attention span—you'll be mesmerized."" -- Luke Kennard - Telegraph ""In her new novel, they, translated by Martin Aitken, the Danish writer Helle Helle captures with uncanny grace the relationship between an unnamed mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter following the former's cancer diagnosis... A world of loss and lyricism follows."" -- Brian Dillon - 4Columns

Helle has enchanting gifts as a storyteller... an immediacy that tenderly and consistently compels.-- ""The New York Times"" Helle Helle's minimalism isn't boring; it crackles with mystery. It's the every day, and yet it's insistently beautiful.-- ""Weekendavisen"" One of my favorite Danish writers--she's the master.-- ""The Guardian""

Author Information

Helle Helle (b. 1965) is one of Denmark’s foremost and best-loved novelists. She has been awarded the Danish Critics’ Prize for Literature, and has received her country’s highest literary accolades, including the Per Olov Enquist Prize, the Golden Laurels of the Danish Booksellers’ Association, the Grand Prize of the Danish Academy, and the Holberg Medal. She has also been nominated four times for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Her highly acclaimed novel This Should Be Written in the Present Tense is her only other work to have appeared in English (praised by John Self in The Guardian for being “a book with all the bigness hidden away.”) Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.

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