The Summer of Ellen
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Agnete Friis’s lyrical, evocative work of psychological suspense weaves together two periods in one man’s life to explore obsession, toxic masculinity, and the tricks we play on our own memory.
Jacob, a middle-aged architect living in Copenhagen, is in the alcohol-soaked throes of a bitter divorce when he receives an unexpected call from his great-uncle Anton. In his nineties and still living with his brother on their rural Jutland farm—a place Jacob hasn’t visited since the summer of 1978—Anton remains haunted by a single question: What happened to Ellen?
To find out, Jacob must return to the farm and confront what took place that summer—one defined by his teenage obsession with Ellen, a beautiful young hippie from the local commune, and the unsolved disappearance of a local girl. In revisiting old friends and rivals, Jacob discovers the tragedies that have haunted him for over forty years were not what they seemed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One evening in Copenhagen, architect Jacob Nielson, the embittered, alcohol-fueled, middle-aged narrator of this bleak standalone from bestseller Friis (the Nina Borg series with Lena Kaaberb l), shows up at the building where his ex-wife, Kirsten, lives and buzzes her apartment. Not surprisingly, Kirsten doesn't let him in. Soon afterward, Jacob receives a phone call from his great-uncle Anton Svenningsen, who lives on a farm in Djursland and with whom he's been out of touch for years. Anton wants his help finding a missing woman named Ellen, and Jacob agrees to return to the farm. Jacob hasn't spent time in that part of Denmark since the summer of 1978, when he was an excessively autoerotic 15-year-old obsessed with Ellen, a member of a hippie commune, and with the unsolved disappearance of a friend's sister. Friis alternates between that summer and Jacob's present-day search for Ellen, with the emphasis on the dual story of Jacob's coming-of-age and his midlife crisis. Mainstream readers who can relate to the self-pitying Jacob will be most rewarded.
