Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
They

They

Helle, Helle
Aitken, Martin

Paperback

General Fiction

Publisher Price: $16.95

ISBN10: 0811239128
ISBN13: 9780811239127
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: Feb 10 2026
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.10 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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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