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Vilhelm's Room

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Vilhelm's Room

By: Tove Ditlevsen, Sophia Hersi Smith - translator, Jennifer Russell - translator
Narrated by: Helen Bang
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm...

The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.

© Tove Ditlevsen 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Classics Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological World Literature Funny Heartfelt
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Critic reviews

Ditlevsen makes this darkest of all material fascinating, perversely likable and occasionally revelatory. She’s a brilliant writer and formidable thinker
Reading Vilhelm’s Room, the final novel from the great Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, what hits you first is how wonderful her sentences are […] Ditlevsen’s unusual way of seeing the world, and her sprightly humour, run throughout this short book, […] which now appears in English for the first time in a spirited translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell […] A beguiling, often confounding novel from one of the 20th century’s most original writers
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