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The Trouble with Happiness
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  • Published: 6 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241537381
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.99

The Trouble with Happiness

and Other Stories

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 June 2023
EBook
3 Feb 2022
Audiobook
3 Mar 2022
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A shimmering collection of stories from the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated into English for the first time

A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of love, marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence and despair, as women and men dream of escaping their conventional roles and finding freedom and happiness - without ever truly understanding what that might mean.
  • Published: 6 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241537381
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties, and was followed by many more books, including her three brilliant volumes of memoir, Childhood (1967), Youth (1967) and Dependency (1971). She married four times and struggled with alcohol and drug abuse throughout her adult life until her death by suicide in 1978.

TD

Also by Tove Ditlevsen

There Lives a Young Girl In Me Who Will Not Die
Childhood, Youth, Dependency
The Umbrella
Vilhelm's Room
The Faces
Childhood
Youth
See all

Praise for The Trouble with Happiness

Splendid short stories... the purity and dazzling insight of Ditlevsen's writing speaks for itself

Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph

An intense reading experience... so clear is Ditlevsen's eye that it's impossible to tear yourself away from the fates of her characters, however grim

John Self, Guardian

These short stories show off her astonishingly precise prose

New Statesman, Ellen Peirson-Hagger

A bracingly bleak selection of stories by the celebrated Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen... These are perfectly judged pieces: authentic, unforced and utterly lucid

Phil Baker, Sunday Times

Ditlevsen's wonderful and devastatingly bleak short stories simmer with melancholy and despair ... Her prose is clear and spare, pared back to the essential task of describing the struggle for an unwon freedom from domestic despair and unsatisfactory marriages

Daily Mail

The depths of desire and despair are Ditlevsen's subjects and illuminating them is her talent

Monocle

Ditlevsen's writing is crystal clear and vividly, painfully raw

The Paris Review

A terrifying talent

The New York Times

Her writing is incredible, so focused and clear. Not a word that doesn't need to be there

Tracey Thorn