IDA JESSEN made her literary debut in 1989 with the collection of short stories Under sten (Under Stones). Her fiction and children’s books have won an array of awards, including The Egholt Prize, The Albert Dam Grant, The Jytte Borberg Prize, and Danish Booksellers’ Golden Laurels. In 2016, En ny tid (A Change of Time) won the Blixen Award as well as the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s Best Novel Award.

MARTIN AITKEN is the translator of numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Kim Leine, Hanne Ørstavik, and Josefine Klougart. His translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. In 2012, he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize.

"A young woman witnesses a terrible accident with unexpected consequences, a mother sits with her unconscious son in a hospital room, a pair of sisters remember their mother's hands braiding their hair. The women in these quietly intense stories are all in one way or another out of sync with their lives and with themselves, women who appease and indulge, fret and acquiesce. Women who yearn to connect, who struggle to come to terms with unfulfilled love, for a husband, a son, a friend, who are locked inside wordless, sexless marriages, or impossibly bound by maternal bonds. Through all six stories, Jessen's women cling to someone, someone from whom love, despite their efforts, cannot be wrung"--