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Published Aug 2021
208 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
From a major new international voice, mesmerizing, inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world.
Under Cancún's hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists' desires, seeing deep into the world's underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine.
After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalized world that's both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika's fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical—"as though the worlds he describes are being viewed through an ultraviolet filter," in one Danish reviewer's words—he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.
"It's Eika's ability to plunge readers headfirst into discomfort or even disgust and then prod for uncomfortable truths that elevates his brazenly weird fiction from crass pyrotechnics to legitimately rewarding puzzles. Utterly brilliant and occasionally confounding, these strange stories catch like fishhooks into the reader's nervous system." - Kirkus Reviews
"[T]hese lyrical stories are preoccupied with a sense of psychosexual loneliness that penetrates even the most absurd moments of escapism. Eika's fusing of the magic realist mode with the alienation of modernity makes for a winning formula." - Publishers Weekly
"Urgent, deliriously discomforting...Eika holds nothing back in his fiction, he goes into the tightest of spaces and most intimate and terrifying of moments in order to breakthrough to places few have been before — or even imagined existing." - Refinery29
"The young Danish author Jonas Eika completely destroys every safety net: his book After the Sun has a combustible power in its longing for another world—and it expands the term 'fiction.' No other poet has exploded onto the scene like Eika in a long while." - Der Spiegel (Germany)
"After the Sun has surprised and enthralled the jury with its global perspective, its sensual and imaginative language, and its ability to speak about contemporary political challenges without the reader feeling in any way directed to a certain place...There is a real sense of poetic magic. Reality opens into other possibilities; other dimensions. There is something wonderful and hopeful in it that reminds us how literature can do more than just mirror what we already know." - The Jury of the Nordic Council Literature Prize
"Political fictions aren't supposed to be this personal. Satires aren't supposed to be this heartbreaking. Surrealism isn't supposed to be this real. Giving a damn isn't supposed to be this fun. From slights of hand, to shocks to the heart, After the Sun is doing all the things you don't expect it to and leaving a big bold mark in what we call literature." - Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
"Striking literary craftsmanship in an experimental mix of shock-lit, sci-fi, dada and Joycean glints presented as loose time scenes that slide in and out like cards in the hands of the shuffler. By the end, this reader had the impression of having been drawn through a keyhole." - Annie Proulx, author of Barkskins
"Eika's prose flexes a light-footed, vigilant, and unpredictable animalism: it's practically pantheresque. After the Sun is an electrifying, utterly original read." - Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
This information about After the Sun 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.
Jonas Eika is one of Denmark's youngest and most exciting writers. His debut novel, Marie House Warehouse, was awarded the Bodil og Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize for emerging Danish writers in 2016. After the Sun has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Nordic Council Literary Prize in 2019. He lives in Copenhagen.
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