The Last Reader

Hanne Lindhardt has not left her apartment in three years. From the third floor of a building on Strandgade, she watches the Copenhagen harbor and translates Russian poetry, the work she has done for half a century. Her groceries come by delivery. Her oldest friend comes on Thursdays. The world outside continues without her.

Then a young bookseller named Sofie Lindgren carries a box of books up three flights of stairs, and Hanne opens the door.

Over fourteen months, across the turning of the Danish seasons, the two women build a friendship around language, poetry, and the careful art of paying attention. Hanne is finishing what may be her last translation. Sofie is discovering what she may become. Neither knows how much time they have.

The Last Reader is a novel about what passes between two people when one of them is teaching and the other is learning, and about what remains when the teaching is done.