Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2019
152 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt's twenty-five-year-old son, Carl, died in a tragic accident.
When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back chronicles the few first years after that devastating phone call. It is at once a sober account of life after losing a child and an exploration of the language of poetry, loss, and love.
Intensely moving, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back explores what it is to be a family, what it is to love and lose, and what it is to treasure life in spite of death's indomitable resolve.
"[T]his book is an alchemical feat, giving shape to the most profound sense of absence. A stirring, inventive masterpiece of heartbreak." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Precise and evocative, often inspiring a strange balance between curiosity and anxiety in the reader... . [Aidt] inspires readers to read between the lines." - Publishers Weekly
"One of the best books ever written about sorrow in Danish literary history, if you ask me. It's heartbreaking in its description of horror, trauma and loss, but it's also beautiful, courageous, poetic, and unforgettable." - Five Books
"Extraordinary. It is about death, but I can think of few books which have such life. It shows us what love is." - Max Porter
"There is no one quite like Naja Marie Aidt. She's comparable only to things like sequoias, whale song, desert thunderstorms, or wolves. The depth of her emotional world and the diaphanous, often brutal clarity with which she understands the human soul beckon us to pause, breathe, think. Here, she takes us on a journey into death and loss, and then thrusts us back out—back into life—more awake, more ready to embrace it as it comes." - Valeria Luiselli
This information about When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of eleven collections of poetry, a novel, and three short story collections, including Baboon, which won the 2008 Nordic Council Literature Prize, Scandinavia's highest literary honor. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages.
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