Showing results by author "Sophia Hersi Smith" in All Categories

Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern; a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind: trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone. Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world.

The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.