Companions

Companions draws together Hesselholdt’s four short novels centring on a young woman, Camilla, and her circle of friends. At once confessional and elliptic, the Camilla books are a running series about a group of characters whom one meets at various stages in their lives. Each part of the book is narrated by a different character, who narrates one story from his or her point of view, and becomes a subordinate character in another. At the centre stand Camilla and her husband Charles, who lead lives that are simultaneously well-ordered and messy, though there’s an itch, an existential longing, especially within the women, which stirs their desires and amplifies conflicts as they go through illness, affairs, grief, landscapes and dinner parties, and move between New York, rural England, Mozambique, Belgrade, Afghanistan and, of course, Denmark.

Christina Hesselholdt, born in 1962, studied at the Danish Academy of Creative Writing in Copenhagen and published her first novel, Kokkenet, Gravkammeret & Landskabet [The Kitchen, the Tomb & the Landscape] in 1991. She has since written several novels and books for children, and has received critical acclaim and awards for her books, including the Beatrice Prize in 2007, the Jytte Borberg Prize in 2007 and the Critics’ Prize in 2010. She was included in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2013. Companions is her first book to appear in English. Her latest work, Vivian, a novel about the photographer Vivian Maier, was published by Rosinante in 2016.
Paul Russell Garrett translates from Danish and Norwegian. He serves on the management committee of the Translators Association and is Programme Director for a new theatre translation initiative, [Foreign Affairs] Translates!