We, the drowned

“We, the Drowned, by Carsten Jensen, isn’t a novel – it’s an entire ocean. It’s a book that’s soaked in salt water and shaped by the tides, but it’s rooted in a very real place, and that place is the tiny town of Marstal, on the very small island of Ærø, which, unbelievably, was once Denmark’s second-biggest port.

Its pages are full of shipwrecks, sea battles, vanishing sailors, extraordinary escapes, shrunken heads, and the women who are left behind. And it’s told with the collective voice of that village, filled with their grief and their pride, with their collective memory, thinking about the generations of men that have been sent out to sea.

It is an engrossing, elemental epic, that really gets to the heart of what it means to be part of such a strong community, and what the cost of adventure really is.”