Madsen Thirty Days of Darkness: This year's most chilling, twisty, darkly funny DEBUT thriller...

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-914585-63-0
Verlag: Orenda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 276 Seiten

A snobbish Danish literary author is challenged to write a crime novel in thirty days, travelling to a small village in Iceland for inspiration, and then a body appears ... an atmospheric, darkly funny, twisty debut thriller, first in an addictive new series. `An original and thoroughly enjoyable treat´ Guardian BOOK OF THE YEAR `Dark and sharp ... A lot of fun´ Val McDermid `Witty, dark, meta, ingenious and hugely compelling. I LOVED the Icelandic setting and satirical observations´ Will Dean `Hilariously scathing. Satirises genre fiction while creating a first-class example of it, full of suspects, red herrings and twists ... wit and originality make it a joy to read´ Mark Sanderson, The Times CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR **Winner of the Harald Mogensen Prize for Best Danish Crime Novel** **Shortlisted for the Glass Key Award** **Winner of the Crime Fiction Lover Award for Best Crime Book in Translation** **Longlisted for the CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger** **Shortlisted for the Capital Crime Fingerprint Awards: Best Debut** COMING SOON TO NETFLIX. -------------------------- Copenhagen author Hannah is the darling of the literary community and her novels have achieved massive critical acclaim. But nobody actually reads them, and frustrated by writer's block, Hannah has the feeling that she's doing something wrong. When she expresses her contempt for genre fiction, Hanna is publicly challenged to write a crime novel in thirty days. Scared that she will lose face, she accepts, and her editor sends her to Húsafjöður - a quiet, tight-knit village in Iceland, filled with colourful local characters - for inspiration. But two days after her arrival, the body of a fisherman's young son is pulled from the water ... and what begins as a search for plot material quickly turns into a messy and dangerous investigation that threatens to uncover secrets that put everything at risk ... including Hannah... Atmospheric, dramatic and full of nerve-jangling twists and turns, Thirty Days of Darkness is a darkly funny, unsettling debut Nordic Noir thriller that marks the start of a breath-taking new series. ______________________________ `Dark and atmospheric ... a bleak and beautiful evocation of Iceland, and Hannah is a pitch-perfect depiction of the bombastic neurosis that we writers know so very well´ Harriet Tyce `Such a clever, original twist on the Nordic Noir tradition - darkly humorous and utterly captivating´ Eva Björg Ægisdóttir `A fantastic debut ... Darkly funny, tense and a lot of poking fun at crime-writing´ Tariq Ashkanani `Delightfully dark´ Antti Tuomainen `So atmospheric´ Crime Monthly `An absolute gem ... a superb mix of humour and dark, twisty crime fiction with an added layer of contemplation regarding what makes books 'literary'. The Icelandic setting is perfectly drawn ... Not to be missed´ Yrsa Sigurðardóttir `Shades of Fargo and Twin Peaks - and there's no higher praise than that. Absolutely brilliant!´ Rod Reynolds `A truly original thriller that perfectly balances humour and suspense´ Vogue `A hugely enjoyable read with thrills and laughs, as Hannah sticks her nose in where it's not welcome´ Michael J. Malone `So satisfying ... a truly great read´ Lilja Sigurðardóttir 'A skilful, witty mash-up ... really entertaining´ Aly Monroe `This reminded me somewhat of the more recent, meta efforts of the great Anthony Horowitz´ The Bookbag `The most original thriller of the year´ Politiken

Jenny Lund Madsen is one of Denmark's most acclaimed scriptwriters (including the international hits Rita and Follow the Money) and is known as an advocate for better representation for sexual and ethnic minorities in Danish TV and film. She recently made her debut as a playwright with the critically acclaimed Audition (Aarhus Teater) and her debut literary thriller, Thirty Days of Darkness, first in an addictive new series, won the Harald Mogensen Prize for Best Danish Crime Novel of the year and was shortlisted for the coveted Glass Key Award. She lives in Denmark with her young family.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Madsen, Jenny Lund

Weitere Mitwirkende

Turney, Megan E.

Leseproben

1
A hand intertwines with another atop the shared armrest. They lean back simultaneously. He turns to look at her a millisecond before she turns to him. He is scared of flying but tries to hide it; she isn’t but pretends she is. They make love with their eyes, falling for each other all over again as they soar into the sky.   Her: I camped out on a mountain. Him: I went skiing. Her: I took your breath away. Him: I danced in Brussels. The plane ascends. His slightly sweaty hand… Ach! What now? How the hell do you plot out the early stages of two people falling in love? How are you meant to portray those emotions without sounding like a knock-off version of Goethe, or worse: a way-too good Barbara Cartland? Regardless: too trite. Holding her finger firmly on the delete button, she erases the entire paragraph and washes away the feeling of inadequacy with an entire, large glass of red wine. Then another – it takes more than just the one glass to expunge the feeling of mediocrity. Hannah Krause-Bendix has never received a bad review. Not once has anyone had a single negative thing to say in any of the reviews of her four novels. A literary superstar, twice nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Didn’t win, but that doesn’t matter; anyway, she doesn’t believe that the hallmark of good literature is how many awards it’s won. She’s actually refused the numerous other prizes she’s won over the years. No – Hannah sees herself as a forty-five-year-old living embodiment of integrity and will always maintain that it is beneath her to seek commercial success. Her editor may very well be the only person alive who knows that this is actually a lie. Dialogue, from the top: Him: There are streets in Copenhagen that only exist in my dreams. Her: But does that make them any less real? Delete. Again. Hannah has never tried her hand at the falling-in-love trope in her books before, and thus far, it feels as if the whole venture is more likely to end up as a one-night stand than some happy ending. Restless, she steps away from the desk: German design, mahogany, strong enough to bear her (usually) ingenious words. Recently though, there hasn’t actually been anything to bear – the words just won’t come. And today’s the same, apparently. She paces around her penthouse apartment, all sixty-seven square metres of it, so it doesn’t take long. She stops at the window, opens it and releases a plume of smoke over the city’s rooftops. It’s a beautiful day. Copenhagen looks good in the autumn sun, as do its people, who seem to insist on wearing short-sleeved tops even though it’s already November. As if bare skin can be convinced it’s still summer. She envies them, sometimes, the people down there, with their carefree faces and soya lattes in disposable cups, pushing their offspring around in prams, waving as they pass each other. Copenhageners really do have a knack of looking so happy on Sundays. For a brief moment, she considers whether she should go to today’s event after all. Bastian will be fawning over her for months if she does. That is an appealing thought, at least: a grateful, compliant editor for a while. How refreshing. She stubs out the cigarette and straightens up. No, she isn’t about to spend her afternoon at some tedious-as-hell book fair, signing copies for a mob of people incapable of distinguishing between books and literature. And anyway, her absence isn’t exactly going to disappoint a whole bus-load of screaming fans. Hannah’s readership is as small as it is elite – despite her literary recognition, she is still an author only by the grace of arts council funding. She writes the kind of literature in which an old man takes a sip of coffee, then stops to think for about forty pages, before taking another sip. By that point, it’s not only the coffee that’s gone cold. So have most of her readers. Hannah walks into the kitchen and tries to visualise the purpose behind this action. Nothing. She invents a hunger that’s not really there, given the fact she only had breakfast an hour ago. Has it really only been an hour? The digital clock flashes at her from the oven. The sight makes her cringe. Not eleven o’clock yet and she’s already on her third glass of wine and fifth cigarette. That will have to stop. From now on, no more alcohol before midday. A vow she’s made to herself time and time again, and one she will undoubtedly break. Christ, what a cliché of an author she is. She opens a few cupboards, closes them again. Same ritual with the fridge: open, close. But the hunger won’t be lured into being – there’s nothing she wants. Why has inspiration been so hard to find lately? Correction: it’s not the inspiration that’s hard to find. There’s plenty of that. It’s more the ability to process it: getting it down into written form. A feeling, a sharp reflection or a meaningful word don’t lay the groundwork for a good story anymore. The rest simply won’t come. Or rather, what does come is so bad that it ends up fluctuating between perfection, the pretentious and the trivial. She can’t quite seem to touch that nerve – the nerve that made her previous works positively tremble. Her talent lies in portraying people. She has this intuitive knack of describing a character in such a way that her reader doesn’t simply feel as if she knows that human being, but that she is that human being. Hannah is an observer. When people compete for the limelight at dinner parties, she doesn’t draw attention to herself by being loud and obnoxious, or by making dramatic gestures. She prefers to keeps herself to herself – offering only a fleeting smile at the occasional droll passage of conversation – and to observe. And that’s when she notices those whose eyes wander, whose words, empty of any meaning, reveal a certain distance, or a desperate attempt to hide something. But what, exactly? A mental imbalance? Boredom? Or, perhaps, something far too beautiful and pure to reveal to the outside world? Hints and suggestions such as these are what Hannah likes to ponder on – likes to use to compose her extraordinary narratives, offering her readers some special worldly wisdom. But Hannah’s started to doubt whether she or her writing actually make her readers any the wiser. Make herself any wiser, even. It’s all just endless trains of thought put down on paper. That’s why she decided to try her hand at a romance, to get herself back on track. Or maybe to dig her teeth into something new. But it’s particularly tricky to plot out a love story when you’ve never had a relationship last beyond the first milestone – and it’s even trickier when you don’t actually believe in plots. She glances out of the kitchen window, over the courtyard, where a group of children seem to be playing a game. If collecting rainwater from a large barrel and watering the flowers can be considered a game. Their broad smiles and happy squeals suggest it’s a fun one. Hannah sighs and contemplates what it must be like to live such a light and happy life. She shakes off the thought, deciding that she can’t just mope around the apartment, feeling sorry for herself. If she’s honest with herself, a lot of her problems are of own making, especially when it comes to her love life. It’s not that Hannah’s incapable of love. She falls in love quite often, actually. It’s just that it never lasts particularly long. On the whole, she has little patience for others, so when it comes to relationships, she’s disappointed before anything’s even started. Disappointed might be the wrong word. Bored is probably more precise. Although that may be because she spends all her time probing around inside the minds of her characters, so she always feels like she’s about ten steps ahead of everyone else. She misses that feeling of being surprised by someone she can’t quite figure out. She’s starting to doubt whether she’ll ever get to feel that again.   Bastian doesn’t doubt her though. Never has. Although he does have hideously bad judgement. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s her best (gah, fine – only) friend, biggest fan and steadfast editor, she would’ve shaken him off years ago, mainly because of his commercial pandering. What is odd though, and she’s often thought about this, is why exactly he puts up with her. Hannah is Bastian’s only real author. The other ‘authors’ he represents churn out cookbooks, thrillers, popular fiction – all the shite people buy because it’s harmless and easily digestible. Books that have answers, good people and bad people, problems that can be solved. In Hannah’s books, there are no answers. There aren’t even questions. Her writing forces her readers to think for themselves. Immerse themselves. Feel. But the reality is, there are few who can these days. Hannah sighs, all the way out to her fingertips. She knows only too well that if one of them should be giving the other the slip, it’s not her – Bastian should’ve ditched her years ago. She’s difficult, and she doesn’t sell. So the fact...