From one of Denmark's most celebrated writers and the author of Childhood, Youth and Dependency, these short stories are brief, devastating, acid-sharp portrayals of love, marriage and family in mid-century Copenhagen. Here the ordinary events of everyday life - a wife anxious not to wake her husband, a little boy losing his father's beloved knife, a married woman's obsessive longing for a yellow silk umbrella, a girl dreaming of a masquerade ball - become dark and disconcerting, as we see what lies beneath.
