Breath and shadows

by Ella Leffland

Thorkild the Counselor and Bodil are brother and sister, Copenhageners born in the early 1700s and very old, but vital, when the novel begins, with great enmity between them. Grethe and Holger are a young married couple who live on the Danish coast in the late 1880s. Cultured, attractive, profoundly in love, they have until the novel's beginning lived a life of deep happiness. Philip and Paula are an American brother and sister living in the late 1980s, he in Chicago, she in Switzerland. Paula has left her husband and moved to a remote village, where, at the novel's start, Philip comes to visit her. The interrelatedness of these three pairs of people, the twining of their destinies, is the core of the book. The core is mystery, but it is not a mystery novel; rather does it concern time, truth and the anarchy that lies behind the fragile structure of human order.