Author: Inger Christensen
Translator: Denise Newman
Publisher: Penguin
Paperback
Burley Fisher Books of the Year 2025
Forest says… Inger Christensen is a remarkable Danish writer, often famed for her poetry collection Alphabet. Another firm favourite of mine from this year is her collection of essays The Condition of Secrecy. Any and all of these are worth your time and attention. There is such mastery of the technical potential of language in her work. How the mind makes sense of language. This is very much the case in Natalja’s Stories. This book takes the Didion quote “we are the stories we tell ourselves” as dictum. Christensen builds the house for us to enter in these stories and once we are inside pulls the walls down around us. The book is a tour de force in fiction writing as a technology.