Companions - Christina Hesselholdt

At once confessional and elliptic, Companions is a novel structured as a series of monologues, centred around Camilla, her husband Charles, and their circle of friends. A character who narrates one story from his or her point of view becomes a subordinate character in another. Christina Hesselholdt writes about 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, the Lake District, Mozambique, Belgrade, Afghanistan and, of course, Denmark. In her first book to be translated into English, Christina Hesselholdt explores everyday life and the weight of the past in her uniquely playful and experimental style.