Duelyktene

Beskrivelse

Astrid is in Amsterdam with her boyfriend Isak and a couple of friends. After an evening of heavy drinking, she heads out into the night alone, as the others discuss the climate crisis and oil drilling. The great catastrophe awaits us all, but in Astrid’s little life it has already happened. Her child went to sleep, never to wake again. The death of her child has made Astrid into the person she is today, a person incapable of fully connecting with others.

Her friends return to the hotel as Astrid roams the snowy streets of Amsterdam. There she meets Mark, a homeless man. With a kind of speechless comprehension, he appears to grasp more about the baggage Astrid is carrying than her friends. In a sensuous and poetic prose, her tragic past story unfolds and memories mingle with the present in ways that Astrid finds difficult to cope with.

The Dove Lanterns is an intense novel about grief, loss and memories. It powerfully shows how destructive it is to lose a child and how difficult it can be to reconnect to the world after the worst has happened.