French Paperback
Extent: 100 pages
ISBN: 9781967751105
Price: $22 / $10 (ebook)

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Søren Ulrik Thomsen’s articulation of insight and experience practically makes you bounce in your chair, exclaiming, yes, yes—that’s how it was, that’s how it is.

—Berlingske

Residing somewhere between the poetic and the decidedly erudite, Thomsen is a superb essayist.

—Weekendavisen

“The future will begin all over again.”

In this radiant autobiographical essay, Danish poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen returns to the place—and the year—that shaped his life. At seventeen, he moved with his family to Store Kongensgade 23 in central Copenhagen. In the apartment on the fourth floor, his adult life began. And in the same apartment, his mother’s long struggle with depression took a brutal turn.

What unfolds is a luminous meditation on time, illness, memory, and the intimacy between mother and son. Thomsen writes with startling clarity and wit about the institutions that failed his mother, the objects and addresses that haunt a life, and the strange braid of love and sorrow that runs through even our brightest days.

Blending memoir, cultural history, and a devastating critique of modern psychiatry, Store Kongensgade 23 is both elegy and reckoning. A cult literary figure in Denmark, Thomsen delivers a masterwork of lucid prose and emotional intelligence—an unforgettable portrait of a family, a city, and a young man coming into consciousness amid the ruins of the twentieth century.

[A]t once a portrait of a city, a shimmering memoir, and a hymn to language and the fragile beauty of human existence.

—Kirstine Reffstrup, author of Iron Lung

Remarkable: a work of erudition and sincerity, profoundly moral yet marked by humility and ambiguity—a book of wisdom born of loss, joy, care, and change.

—Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork

In this outstanding essay, Denmark’s foremost living poet evokes the drizzle and the cold wind and the anguished ecstasy of his formative Copenhagen years with such sharp, cutting beauty that you want to be nowhere else.

—Mikkel Rosengaard, author of The Invention of Ana