Vilhelm's Room
Tove Ditlevsen author Jennifer Russell translator Sophia Hersi Smith translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Publishing:3rd Sep '26
£10.99
This title is due to be published on 3rd September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£12.99(9780241628980)

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.
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 *
ISBN: 9780241628997
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 15mm
Weight: 200g
160 pages