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"A young woman witnesses a terrible accident with unexpected consequences, a mother sits with her unconscious son in a hospital room, a pair of sisters remember their mother's hands braiding their hair. The women in these quietly intense stories are all in one way or another out of sync with their lives and with themselves, women who appease and indulge, fret and acquiesce. Women who yearn to connect, who struggle to come to terms with unfulfilled love, for a husband, a son, a friend, who are locked inside wordless, sexless marriages, or impossibly bound by maternal bonds. Through all six stories, Jessen's women cling to someone, someone from whom love, despite their efforts, cannot be wrung"--
About the author
Ida Jessen
Summary
“Jessen's writing is graceful, unhurried, convincing.” —Kirkus Reviews
Ida Jessen follows the inner lives of several women on the brink, or the sidelines, of catastrophe in this prize-winning collection of stories
Written with the same narrative generosity, the same belief in the dignity and voice of her characters as Marilynne Robinson
From the winner of the Lifetime Award from the Danish Arts Foundation and the 2017 Critics’ Choice Award, Ida Jessen’s A Postcard for Annie traces the tangled emotional lives of women facing moral dilemmas.
A young woman witnesses a terrible accident with unexpected consequences, a mother sits with her unconscious son in a hospital room, a pair of sisters remember their mother’s hands braiding their hair.
In seaside tourist villages and in snowy cities, turbulence destabilizes composed lives, whether through outright violence between strangers or habitual domination between loved ones.
Jessen fills each story with bracing passages that teem with the living world, only to become concentrated in the unfixed, vacillating matter of a human psyche caught between silence and speech, paralysis and action.
