Celebrated for her signature insight and precision, Tine Høeg returns with a wry, haunting, and riotously funny novel about how loss is bound up with the urge to create

Asta is invited to a memorial. It’s been ten years since her university friend August died. The invitation disrupts everything – the novel she is working on and her friendship with Mai and her two-year-old son – reanimating longings, doubts, and the ghosts of parties past. Soon a new story begins to take shape. Not of the obscure Polish sculptor Asta wanted to write about, but of what really happened the night of August’s death, and in the stolen, exuberant days leading up to it. The story she has never dared reveal to Mai.

Moving between Asta’s past and present, Memorial, 29 June is a novel about who we really are, and who we thought we would become. It’s a novel about the intensity with which we experience the world in our twenties, and how our ambitions, anxieties, and memories from that time never relinquish their grasp on how we encounter our future.

In prose that shimmers like poetry, masterfully translated by Misha Hoekstra, Memorial, 29 June is an urgent yet tender reminder that sometimes pain is where the love is, and that grief, however thorny, should never go unspoken.

This is clever writing. Høeg clutches achingly at the bonds of youth gone by and pulls the strings of her story with ease. Hoekstra conveys in a buoyant translation

– Martin Aitken, literary translator

Intimate and diamond-sharp, both in style and wit. Høeg takes us to the raw, tender, and absurd intersection in a writer’s life of what is, what once was, and what still could be

– Saskia Vogel, literary translator and author of Permission

With an uncanny ear for line breaks and an eye for emotional vulnerability, Tine Høeg draws a tender portrait of the friendship between Mai and Asta, confirming that the past tentacles into the present, whether we want it to or not

– Anna Stern, author of all this here, now

Memorial, 29 June is a breathless read, delivered in pin-sharp prose. An understated novel of repressed love, grief and longing – and a subtle essay on the creative process. Høeg deftly reveals Asta’s hidden and written stories in tandem, from the first glimmer and restlessness of beginning, through urgency and self-isolation and denial, to the defining moment of declaration. Gorgeous

– Sonia Overall, author of Eden

Tine Høeg’s play with words is both sensuous and powerful... The novel delivers writing that is both tender and poetic, which you become addicted to

– Børsen

A fluid, minimalistic, carefully crafted, and precise – right down to every single line break and full stop

– ELLE

Language is fun with Tine Høeg – with a dark background. Her second novel exerts a poetry through leaving the words almost bare. It is vulnerable and strong at the same time. Just like the youth it treats narratively

– Information

Tine Høeg has written the finest art novel about the gap between different life phases – one which all embittered romantics can throw themselves headlong into... It’s enchanting reading

– Weekendavisen

A brilliant acquaintance ... Tine Høeg is a bloody special writer, and it is bloody special to be able to write so tenderly and warmly and fluidly and despairingly and funnily about both the specific and the universal, and about different ages, and about both female and male experience

– Berlingske