Editions

Youth

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780241405550

  • Length: 128  Pages

  • Dimensions: 216mm x 9mm x 135mm

  • Weight: 135g

  • RRP: £9.99

Youth

'Utterly, agonisingly compulsive ... a masterpiece' Liz Jensen, Guardian

The second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers

Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a chequered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation - until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach.

Youth, the second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a strikingly honest and immersive portrait of adolescence, filled with biting humour, vulnerability and poeticism.

  • Imprint: Penguin Classics

  • ISBN: 9780241405550

  • Length: 128  Pages

  • Dimensions: 216mm x 9mm x 135mm

  • Weight: 135g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • The best books I have read this year ... They act as a manifesto for art, showing that literature is not the base metal: it is the process of alchemy, and the gold that results

    John Self, New Statesman

  • Mordant, vibrantly confessional... A masterpiece

    Guardian

  • Semi-miraculous, raw and poignant ... Radiates the clear light of truth and stands as the ultimate victory of a life that must have felt, in the living of it, like a defeat

    Alex Preston, Observer

  • Intense, elegant ... Ditlevsen's portrait of Vesterbro in the Twenties has something of the same texture of Elena Ferrante's description of the poor Neapolitan neighbourhood in which her heroines grow up

    Lucy Scholes, The Daily Telegraph

  • Wrenching sadness and pitch-black comedy ... Sharp, tough and tender

    Boyd Tonkin, Spectator

  • Ditlevsen's taut, simple prose shines a light on what life and love were like for working-class women in 20th century Copenhagen. Elena Ferrante fans, take note

    Stylist

  • Despite the darkness that haunts these three books, they shine with Ditlevsen's honesty and humanity ... Her work, seemingly so simple, has the miraculous quality of a life perceived in perfect clarity. Despite the author's untimely death, The Copenhagen Trilogy is a powerful - and uplifting - testament of survival

    Erica Wagner

  • Incredibly compelling and timely

    Amber Butchard, The Saturday Review

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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.

Tove Ditlevsen

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Features

Tove Ditlevsen: Why it's time to discover Denmark's most famous literary outsider

‘The Billie Holliday of poetry’ was ignored by the male establishment, but her pioneering autofiction is finally being recognised around the world

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