Description

Hafni says: I don’t want to be me.

I want to change who I am.

I don’t know how to change who I am.

Hafni says she’s getting divorced. To celebrate, she sets out across Denmark on a smorrebrod tour, to taste-test all of the best open-faced sandwiches her country has to offer. One month later, she makes a phone call from a lay-by to tell us where she went, what went wrong and why she’s been gone for three weeks longer than expected.

Marked by Helle Helle’s signature subtlety and infused with her dark humour, Hafni says explores the desire to be anyone but yourself – and what it means to rediscover who you are.

‘Colourful, intricate and surprising, a whole rich world in microcosm.’ Polly Barton, author of What Am I, A Deer?

Publisher Review

‘Hafni Says is a radically experimental and completely unbridled book. It’s a novel about crisis and downfall, about the will to live, alienation, freedom, guilt and shame, and the heavy gaze of expectation. Simply put, it’s a novel about existence…Helle Helle has long proven that her authorship can’t be dismissed in a subordinate clause. Several of her novels already stand as masterpieces in Danish literature. Hafni Says is no exception.’ ‘Like a multifaceted jewel, or a particularly glossy bead of salmon roe, Hafni says shifts and scintillates, in turns pensive, sad, humorous, wondrous, heartbreaking, but all of its moods carry the traces of the others, which is to say: the weight, the longing, the texture of a whole life. This is the saddest, strangest, realest road trip book I’ve ever read.’ — Polly Barton, author of What Am I, A Deer? ‘Hafni’s story makes you both laugh and cry. Full of situational comedy and consummate humour keen to the quirks of language. Full of sorrow and anxiety, simultaneously conveyed and assuaged by Helle’s marvellous writing (…) I envy anyone who is about to read this novel.