Memorial, 29 June | by Tine Høeg | (E-book)
Memorial, 29 June | by Tine Høeg | (E-book)
Translated from Danish by Misha Hoekstra
NOMINATED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
Celebrated for her signature insight and precision, Tine Høeg returns with a wry, haunting, and riotously funny novel about how loss is bound up with the urge to create
Asta is invited to a memorial. It’s been ten years since her university friend August died. The invitation disrupts everything – the novel she is working on and her friendship with Mai and her two-year-old son – reanimating longings, doubts, and the ghosts of parties past. Soon a new story begins to take shape. Not of the obscure Polish sculptor Asta wanted to write about, but of what really happened the night of August’s death, and in the stolen, exuberant days leading up to it. The story she has never dared reveal to Mai.
Moving between Asta’s past and present, Memorial, 29 June is a novel about who we really are, and who we thought we would become. It’s a novel about the intensity with which we experience the world in our twenties, and how our ambitions, anxieties, and memories from that time never relinquish their grasp on how we encounter our future.
In prose that shimmers like poetry, masterfully translated by Misha Hoekstra, Memorial, 29 June is an urgent yet tender reminder that sometimes pain is where the love is, and that grief, however thorny, should never go unspoken.
Publication 2 February 2023
Description 216 × 138 mm, 326 pages, hardcover
ISBN 978-1-915267-11-5
Design Kasper Vang
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TINE HØEG (b. 1985) is a Danish author. Her novel New Passengers, published by Lolli Editions in 2020, won an English PEN Award and Bogforum’s Debutantpris, the prize awarded each year for the best literary debut published in Denmark. Høeg’s own adaptation of the novel has been staged at the Royal Danish Theatre. She lives in Copenhagen.
MISHA HOEKSTRA has translated numerous Danish authors, including Hans Christian Andersen and Maren Uthaug. In 2017, he received the Danish Translation Prize, and his translation of Dorthe Nors’s Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Praise for Memorial, 29 June
Høeg writes with arresting wit and subtlety. Sharp yet delicately drawn, Memorial, 29 June is a tender study of living together and apart, and a compelling meditation on creativity, grief and yearning written with startling precision
– Sussie Anie, author of To Fill a Yellow House
This is clever writing. Høeg clutches achingly at the bonds of youth gone by and pulls the strings of her story with ease. Hoekstra conveys in a buoyant translation
– Martin Aitken, literary translator
Intimate and diamond-sharp, both in style and wit. Høeg takes us to the raw, tender, and absurd intersection in a writer’s life of what is, what once was, and what still could be
– Saskia Vogel, literary translator and author of Permission
With an uncanny ear for line breaks and an eye for emotional vulnerability, Tine Høeg draws a tender portrait of the friendship between Mai and Asta, confirming that the past tentacles into the present, whether we want it to or not
– Anna Stern, author of all this here, now
Memorial, 29 June is a breathless read, delivered in pin-sharp prose. An understated novel of repressed love, grief and longing – and a subtle essay on the creative process. Høeg deftly reveals Asta’s hidden and written stories in tandem, from the first glimmer and restlessness of beginning, through urgency and self-isolation and denial, to the defining moment of declaration. Gorgeous
– Sonia Overall, author of Eden
It’s no mean feat to write a whole book that looks fragmented on the page but joins up seamlessly in the head
– Sara Baume, author of Seven Steeples
Asta is invited to attend a memorial of her university friend August, who died of a heart problem. This invitation brings dread to Asta and the reader find out this is due to a series of events which triggered the death. To add a further twist, Asta is trying to write a novel about a sculptor, Lysander Milo, who secretly created statues of his co-workers and hid them in his basement… Astra has managed to keep her memories hidden but with past and present both ganging up on her, she has no choice but to fully expose herself to them. [Høeg] push[es] our pre-conceived ideas of what literature should be
– The Bobsphere
A fluid, minimalistic, carefully crafted, and precise novel – right down to every single line break and full stop
– ELLE
Tine Høeg’s play with words is both sensuous and powerful... The novel delivers writing that is both tender and poetic, which you become addicted to
– Børsen
Language is fun with Tine Høeg – with a dark background. Her second novel exerts a poetry through leaving the words almost bare. It is vulnerable and strong at the same time. Just like the youth it treats narratively
– Information
Tine Høeg has written the finest art novel about the gap between different life phases – one which all embittered romantics can throw themselves headlong into... It’s enchanting reading
– Weekendavisen
A brilliant acquaintance ... Tine Høeg is a bloody special writer, and it is bloody special to be able to write so tenderly and warmly and fluidly and despairingly and funnily about both the specific and the universal, and about different ages, and about both female and male experience
– Berlingske