In English for the first time, with a foreword written by Zindzi Mandela, daughter of Nelson Mandela, this is a heartbreaking memoir of infertility, adoption, and fatherhood from one of Denmark’s most beloved tv personalities. One summer evening, on a blind date that is almost cancelled, Pelle Hvenegaard meets Caroline. He knows right away that this woman is the love of his life and the mother of his children. Their path to a family is not smooth. But after six years of infertility and the trials of the adoption system, they finally open the doors of their Copenhagen home to little Zoe Ukhona. Pelle’s account, told through letters to his daughter, is brutally honest, heart-wrenchingly tragic, and yet filled with warmth and good humour. It is a story of love, family, and hope. Highly recommended to those moved by Sarah Sentilles’ "Stranger Care" and "Finding Chika" by Mitch Albom. Pelle Hvenegaard first became world famous at twelve years old when he played the lead role in Bille August's Oscar-winning film "Pelle the Conqueror". A career in television and broadcast journalism followed. He has written four books on themes of adoption, love and identity.
BEST RATED BOOK OF 2018 AND 2019 on Mofibo, Denmark's biggest e-book and audiobook platform. When one summer evening, on a blind date that is almost cancelled, Pelle Hvenegaard meets Caroline, he knows right away: This woman will be the mother to his children. Their first meeting grows into a blazing romance, and it is quickly clear that the two of them want to have a family together - but biology toys with them. Dear Zoe Ukhona is Pelle Hvenegaard's honest, comic, tragic and heartwarming tale of the six-year fertility and adoption hell he and his partner had to go through before they could open the door to their apartment in Copenhagen with little Zoe Ukhona in their arms.We follow Caroline and Pelle's arduous inner journey, but we are also with them when - to keep themselves going - they travel to five continents before climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro to call out to their coming child, unaware that she had in fact been born just twenty days earlier in South Africa. This is a story of love and of dealing with life when it doesn't go the way you planned. A story about searching for happiness and meaning - and the joy of finding them both. From the foreword by Zindzi Mandela: "... on top of being a book about battling childlessness, it's a story of hope, a story of love, a story of fighting for happiness ... it's a story about the meaning of life." PELLE HVENEGAARD became world famous as a twelve-year-old when he played the lead role in Bille August's Oscar-winning film Pelle the Conqueror. He has a degree in journalism and has worked in the TV industry for many years. This is his first of three books.
Fatherhood norms have changed considerably in the Nordic countries over the past decades. The sight of a father pushing his baby in a pram is no longer rare, and parental leave is no longer for mothers only. Yet parental leave is still not shared equally, despite parents having the right. Nordic fathers only use 10-30 percent of the total leave. State of Nordic Fathers examines why; and identifies possible avenues to increase fathers’ share of childcare and leave. 10 key findings reveal that fathers’ involvement is a key to gender equality and fathers who have taken long leave distinguish themselves in many respects from those who took none. State of Nordic Fathers is based on a survey capturing the attitudes of 7515 men and women, mostly parents, in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, on childcare work, parental leave, masculinity norms, and workplace and family relationships.
“Relentlessly thrilling . . . an orgy of the unpredictable.” —New York Times Book Review “Like Thomas Pynchon taking on late capitalism. . . . surrealistic, granular in its details, and concerned with social entropy and desperate attempts at communion.” —Wall Street Journal From a major new international voice, mesmerizing, inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world. Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine. After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalized world that’s both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika’s fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical—“as though the worlds he describes are being viewed through an ultraviolet filter,” in one Danish reviewer's words—he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.
Sonja's over forty, and she's trying to move in the right direction. She's learning to drive. She's joined a meditation group. And she's attempting to reconnect with her sister. But Sonja would rather eat cake than meditate. Her driving instructor won't let her change gear. And her sister won't return her calls. Sonja's mind keeps wandering back to the dramatic landscapes of her childhood--the singing whooper swans, the endless sky, and getting lost barefoot in the rye fields--but how can she return to a place that she no longer recognises? And how can she escape the alienating streets of Copenhagen?
This world has changed. The future has changed. Childhood is changing. Raising children has never been more challenging - or potentially rewarding. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the world into which our young children will enter as adults, somewhere between 2020 and 2030, will be nothing like the world their parents grew up in, or even the world we currently inhabit. We need a better understanding of the world of the future in order to prepare our children and to 'future-proof' them. Future-proof Your Child is a very different kind of parenting book. It contains many useful, practical hints and tips but also focuses on the context for parenting and child development today. It convinces 21st-century parents of the need to change their approach to parenting future generations and is relevant, accessible, practical and inspirational. Future-proof Your Child highlights the critical importance of making choices, having conversations and consciously connecting with tomorrow's children today.
When Alice is with Mathilde, her experience of the world shifts, as though Mathilde brings with her a force that charges everything around her: the park bench, the sticky linoleum floor of the supermarket, their interlocked hands, the buttons on a winter coat. But Mathilde is also mercurial and "perfectly" married to Alexander, and Alice is moving into a bigger flat with Simon who has just returned to her life. Alice's precarious solution is to proceed into a quadrilateral relationship, impatient to define her own outline in the eyes of others. Elastic is a novel about being a woman. About being a woman among other women, among men, and about being alone with one's female body. Alice doesn't like being a woman. She feels estranged from her own body, from her gender. At the same time, Elastic is also a modern love story. About Alice's silenced yet stormy crush on the enigmatic Mathilde. A crush that has no place neither in Alice's relationship with Simon, in Mathilde's marriage, or even in Alice herself. Bille cleanly gleans the nebulous distinctions between love, sex and intimacy, exerting a softly fragmentary style that underpins Alice's vacillations. She explores what it means to refuse settling - in a relationship, in society, and within oneself - and to want both love and community without being able to detach from the selfishness that brought us there in the first place. Praise for Elastic The tone of the novel is set from the very first page. Alice, a brilliantly honest main character, narrates the novel in a uniquely fragmented style. Bille uses creative imagery that is sometimes disturbing, but always poetic - Buzz Magazine Alice in Wonderland like you've never seen her before - Octavia Bright Bille's Alice has relatives or even sisters in Françoise Sagan's 1950s novels - there is something Saganesque about Elastic and its depiction of open love affairs and the complicated triangulations, mirroring and conflicts they might entail - Politiken A novel that speaks quietly and yet insistently of the loneliness of being in love and the feeling of being trapped in one's own body - Information Elastic is difficult to let go of. It left me with the feeling of being seen. And not just seen: seen through - POV International Elastic is first and foremost a tale of Alice and her fumbling attempts to set love free. But it is the novel's lonely, heartfelt voice and its unromantic depiction of love that gets stuck into your bones - ATLAS JOHANNE BILLE (b.1993) is a Danish novelist based in Copenhagen. Elastic is her second novel, originally published in Danish by Forlaget Gladiator in 2018. SHERYLIN NICOLETTE HELLBERG is a literary translator. She has published translations of Tove Ditlevsen, Jonas Eika, and Ida Marie Hede. In 2018, she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her translation of Caspar Eric's Nike.
Stories from a world both fantastically strange and gruellingly familiar where isolation, ruin, prejudice, and misinformation soar in an irresistible, susurrant fugue of displaced families yearning to belong In the four stories that make up The Dolls, characters are plagued by unexplained illnesses and oblique, human-made disasters and environmental losses. A big sister descends into the family basement. Another sister refuses her younger brother. A third sister with memory loss is on the run and offered shelter by Notpla, a man both an ally and an enemy. A fourth set of siblings travel to Hungary with their late mother in a coffin. They each have a different version of their mother's story. Drawing on the likes of August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Andrej Kurkov, Knut Hamsun, T.S. Eliot, Béla Tarr, and Hieronymus Bosch, Scavenius's universe is chilling and excruciatingly seductive. In it, nothing can be said to be true anymore. After all, anything can be propaganda today. Praise for The Dolls Here is a writer of extremely unusual imaginative powers. I found myself completely entranced. This is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing I've ever read - Editor's Pick, BBC Radio 4 From a Rear Window-like position, a girl in a wheelchair watches extremely sinister happenings at a refugee centre with her complicit parents while her sister refuses to leave the basement of their house. A woman seeks refuge from the ever-present threat of war or the chaos of climate change with a man whose identity is as unclear as his intentions... These are artful, singular stories which, with rigorous inventiveness of language and technique, vividly evoke the calamities that form our nightmares - The Irish Times Fiercely anti-establishment and addictively macabre. The translation is appropriately atmospheric: Jennifer Russell has done a marvellous job of weaving the narrative seamlessly between an almost dreamlike lyricism and a grisly reality - Translating Women Scavenius's book is filled with impressive observation and uncomfortable characters, all bound together by her peculiarnand gritty prose, beautifully told in Russell's immaculate translation - Asymptote A dilute wash of watercolour exposes the terrifying images and themes underneath... Emerging from Scavenius' world, we recognise the cruelty and threat and bewilderment as not only the domain of the world she's writing from, but also a powerful and poetic compression of where we live - Exacting Clam Ursula Scavenius is one of the most exciting Danish short story writers at work today. The Dolls, in Jennifer Russell's magnificent translation, is a literary page-turner: haunting, mesmerizing, and unforgettable in all its grotesque glory - Katrine Øgaard Jensen Scavenius's dystopian narratives are hard to put down, recalling both historical crimes and current crises - Information URSULA SCAVENIUS is a writer based in Copenhagen. She is a graduate of the Danish Academy of Creative Writing and holds an MA in comparative literature and Italian from the University of Copenhagen. She debuted in 2015 with the short story collection Fjer [Feathers], which won the Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize and was nominated for the Montana Prize for Fiction. Her second book, The Dolls, was published in January 2020 and was shortlisted for the Edvard P. Prize that same year, as was Feathers in 2015. JENNIFER RUSSELL has published translations of Amalie Smith, Christel Wiinblad, and Peter-Clement Woetmann. She was the recipient of the 2019 Gulf Coast Prize for her translation of Ursula Scavenius's
