A startling, intimate work of irrevocable power and beauty about a quietly aching young girl and her dying mother from one of Denmark's finest and best-loved novelists

Following a number of moves, they?the mother and daughter of this elusive, strangely riveting novel set in 1980s Denmark?now live in a corner apartment over the hairdresser shop in the same small town where they've always lived. It's only ever been the two of them?and they are so enmeshed, so impossibly close, it can be hard to tell them apart?then one day her mother feels a lump in her throat, and ?nothing's the way it is,? as our young heroine reflects. The mother has fallen ill, and the daughter is at loose ends, barely sixteen and just starting high school. As they wait for a diagnosis, none of her new friends?not Tove Dunk, Hafni, Bob, nor Desert Boots?can truly know what she is going through, but as readers we are privy to her private turmoil, her quietly wavering, and luminously questioning spirit. In its splintering, multi-layered, perpetual present tense, Helle finds an unexpectedly moving voice for the heroine's pain, one that somehow speaks without words. Highly acclaimed for her miniaturist style, her spare and compact prose?understated, but suffused with feeling?Helle's language has been rendered here into impeccable English by Martin Aitken. they is exquisite, oblique, calibrated, odd, and oddly affecting in its depiction of mother-daughter love, of its attendant longing and inevitable letting go.