Umbrella: Tove Ditlevsen (Penguin Archive)

Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by chance or infrequently.’

Longing shimmers from these spare but profoundly moving short stories by one of Denmark’s most fearless and sharp-eyed authors. In these tales of inarticulate desire and repression, Ditlevsen pulls to the surface our deepest interiorities in devastating, exacting prose.