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Vilhelm's Room
  • Published: 25 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241628980
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $26.99
Categories:

Vilhelm's Room

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
25 Nov 2025
EBook
28 Aug 2025
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Divorce, madness and self-destruction: the unforgettable final novel from the great Danish writer

I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm...

The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.
  • Published: 25 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241628980
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $26.99
Categories:

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
The Trouble with Happiness
The Faces
Childhood
Youth
See all

Praise for Vilhelm's Room

Ditlevsen makes this darkest of all material fascinating, perversely likable and occasionally revelatory. She’s a brilliant writer and formidable thinker

Guardian

Reading Vilhelm’s Room, the final novel from the great Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, what hits you first is how wonderful her sentences are […] Ditlevsen’s unusual way of seeing the world, and her sprightly humour, run throughout this short book, […] which now appears in English for the first time in a spirited translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell […] A beguiling, often confounding novel from one of the 20th century’s most original writers

Observer