What Kingdom

Fine Gråbøl’s 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 what’s 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.