Flower Valley - by Niviaq Korneliussen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An ode to queer heartache amid the ruin of colonization from Greenland's emerging literary star.

In East Greenland, a field by stunning fells and a stinking stream blooms with plastic flowers year round: Naasuliardarpi, or Flower Valley, an unofficial graveyard for victims of the region's suicide epidemic. The unnamed narrator of Flower Valley is no stranger to the gravitational pull of grief, having lost her best friend to suicide at age thirteen. With the support of her raucous family and her mercurial girlfriend Maliina, she tries to avoid the same fate. Attending college in Copenhagen, she tolerates her Danish peers who barely hide their biases against Indigenous Greenlanders, but school grows harder to balance as crisis brews at home. When Maliina calls her for help, she drops everything and dives headfirst into a familiar vortex.

In Niviaq Korneliussen's wrenching, bleakly funny second novel, her unnamed narrator chases the thrills of sapphic love against all sense and odds, channeling the mordant humor of her community on the brink even as she unravels.

Review Quotes

Praise for Niviaq Korneliussen and Last Night in Nuuk:

"Korneliussen [is] perhaps the territory's most widely read living novelist, and the first of a new generation of Greenlandic writers to find a true readership outside of her native land . . . [creating] her own genre of 'unfiltered sexual realism.'" --The New Yorker

"Sometimes you can feel how furiously a novel poured out of someone. . . . Korneliussen's candid evocations of sex and sexuality did not especially scandalize Greenlandic readers. What did scandalize them was Korneliussen's often critical portrayal of Greenland." -- Electric Literature

About the Author

Martin Aitken holds a PhD in Linguistics and has translated contemporary novels, short stories, and poetry. His work, primarily from Danish and Norwegian, has been shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the US National Book Awards, the International Booker Prize, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, among others. He received the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Nadia Christensen Prize in 2012, the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019, and the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2022. His many published translations include novels by Olga Ravn, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Helle Helle, Hanne Ørstavik, Fine Gråbøl, Kim Leine, and Ida Jessen. Aitken hails from the north of England, where he studied community theatre and creative writing before settling in Denmark.