Danish authors have left remarkable footprint in the world of literature despite it being a small county and Danish not being a widespread language. Enjoy 6 Best Danish Books to Read in English!
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6 Best Danish Books to Read in English
We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
In 1848 a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return – and those who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas.
Spanning four generations, two world wars and a hundred years, We, The Drowned is an epic tale of adventure, ruthlessness and passion.
My Work by Olga Ravn
My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms―fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters―to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.“Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn’s book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration.
Lucky Per by Henrik Pontoppidan
Social realism and fairy tale combine in Lucky Per, a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees a restricted life in rural Jutland for Denmark’s capital city. Per is a gifted young man who firmly believes that ‘you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast … and capture and bind it’. He falls in with Copenhagen’s Jewish community, and falls for Jakobe Salomon, a wealthy heiress, who is not only the strongest character in the book but among the great Jewish heroines of European literature.
Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will both reshape Denmark’s landscape and correct its minor position in the world. Eventually personal and his career ambitions alike come to grief. At the heart of Lucky Per lies the question of the relationship of ‘luck’ to ‘happiness’ (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship which Per comes to view differently by the end of his life.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow By Peter Høeg
First published in 1992, Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow instantly became an international sensation. When caustic Smilla Jaspersen discovers that her neighbor–a neglected six-year-old boy, and possibly her only friend–has died in a tragic accident, a peculiar intuition tells her it was murder. Unpredictable to the last page, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is one of the most beautifully written and original crime stories of our time, a new classic.
Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
Romantics, adventurers, sensualists, melancholics and dreamers inhabit the bizarre and exotic world conjured up in these seven intricately interwoven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and Elsinore, to a dhow on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar.
Proclaimed a masterpiece on its publication in 1934, this collection is shot through with themes of love and desire – from the maiden lady who now believes herself to have been the grand courtesan of her time, to the Count whose wife is so jealous that she cannot bear him to admire her jewels, and Lincoln Forsner, an Englishman whose search for a woman he met in a brothel leads him into many strange adventures.
The Shamer’s Daughter by Lene Kaaberbøl
Dina has inherited her mother’s gift: she is a Shamer, able to see a person’s most guilty secrets just by gazing in their eyes. But sometimes her gift feels more like a curse. Nobody seems to want a friend who can see their deepest shame.
But when Dina’s mother is called to Dunark Castle to uncover the truth about a terrible crime, Dina must come to terms with her power, and quickly – or let her mother fall prey to the vicious dragons of Dunark.
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