The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

"Tove Ditlevsen's writing is both engulfing and totally controlled. She knows things about life. But just as important, she has a rare capacity to build from the tragic blocks of her life a perfect and eviscerating story. The greatness of her writing feels like an unsolvable mystery: far away, and up above." --Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room

"Ditlevsen is self-deprecating and effective at conveying the fish-eye view of a child in a claustrophobic environment; she understands that part of the memoirist's job is to remember how life felt and synthesize it in a way she couldn't have at the time. . . . Ditlevsen is a master of slow realization, quick characterization, and concise ironies." --Lauren Oyler, Harper's

"[The Copenhagen Trilogy] is an absolute tour de force, the final volume in particular. They're as brilliant as I'd been led to expect, but also surprisingly intense and elegant . . . [Ditlevsen's writing] is crystal clear and vividly, painfully raw." --Lucy Scholes, The Paris Review

Memoir as confession--a powerful, psychologically astute work of self-examination and remembrance. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Readers will find [Ditlevsen's] ruthless self-scrutiny both admirable and shocking. --Margaret Quamme, Booklist

"Mordant, vibrantly confessional . . . A masterpiece." --Liz Jensen, The Guardian

"The best books I have read this year. These volumes slip in like a stiletto and do their work once inside. Thrilling." --John Self, New Statesman

"Both [The Copenhagen Trilogy and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels] depict, with first-hand grittiness and luminous subjectivity, bookish girls growing up in working-class districts, whether in 1950s Naples or 1930s Copenhagen. From an artistic viewpoint, Ditlevsen's work is the more interesting . . . She looks the slimy and intolerable in the eye and burnishes it into cut glass. She's a writer who, like Jean Rhys, explores the seamy ambiguities of female abjection - with a voice whose power blasts through." --Lucasta Miller, The Times Literary Supplement

"Astonishing, honest, entirely revealing and, in the end, devastating. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable not only for its honesty and lyricism; these are books that journey deep into the darkest reaches of human experience and return, fatally wounded, but still eloquent." --Alex Preston, Observer