What Kingdom

Fine Gråbøls narrator dreams of furniture flickering to life. A chair that greets you, shiny tiles that follow a peculiar grammar, or a bookshelf that can be thrown on like an apron.

Obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness, assuming personalities and private motives, the nameless narrator lives in a temporary psychiatric care unit for young people in Copenhagen. This is a place where you wake up and realise that whats going to happen has no name, and days are spent practicing routines that take on the urgency of survival peeling a carrot, drinking prune juice, listening through thin walls.

In prose that demands that you slow down, expertly translated by Martin Aitken, What Kingdom charts a wisdom of its own.