"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.