Doghead
ABOUT
THE BOOK
In the Eriksson family, childhood is a shocking experience, full of crude and disturbing rites of passage. It all started with Askild ‘the Crackpot’, chased by bloodhounds on a German plain after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp: he is a painter, a murderer and a thief.
His son, Niels ‘Jug Ears’ Junior, is born in an outhouse, wins respect by kicking other boys in the balls, and uses dynamite to blow up the privy when his father sells his cherished coin collection.
And his son, Asger ‘the Liar’, collects stories about his shipwrecked family which are always exciting though not entirely true. He is haunted by the time he spent hidden in the space under the stairs with his fat aunt, aka ‘the Little Bitch’. He has a confession to make and a buried treasure to find. Unable to banish Doghead, a horror from his childhood, to the shadow realm, he reveals the very bad deeds children can do – to push his family story forward, past a point of no return.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Tiina
Nunnally
Tiina Nunnally is an award-winning translator (from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) and novelist. She was awarded the prestigious PEN Translation Prize in 2001 for her translation of the third volume of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, and her translations of Hans Christian Andersen and Tove Ditlevsen for Penguin Classics have been widely praised.
Tiina Nunnally is an award-winning translator (from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) and novelist. She was awarded the prestigious PEN Translation Prize in 2001 for her translation of the third volume of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, and her translations of Hans Christian Andersen and Tove Ditlevsen for Penguin Classics have been widely praised.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
The narrator of this family chronicle is the young painter Asger, who tells the colourful and sometimes grotesque story or rather stories of his family combining psychology, storytelling and magic realism.
A fantastic tale of three generations, magical and grotesque at times and quite haunting.
This is an overwhelmingly powerful novel about an abnormal family, the story is fantastically written, richly imaginative with a lot of black humour in all the tragic stuff.