Adorable

From one of Scandinavia's most innovative writers, a shimmering journey into the absurd phenomenality of family life – and the human microbiome

Adorable is a haunting, transmundane portrait of a young family told in four parts, in Copenhagen and London. The love between B and Q is tender but worn. When their daughter Æ is born, the everyday lights up in a new way. In its second part, the dead are animated in B's brain. When B's father dies, the news is delivered to her by phone and an essayistic, collagist meditation on death and transmission ensues. And then, it's finally Friday. B and Q descend below the living room floor and wander through a cracked and skittish underworld.

In Ida Marie Hede's porous world, which is our world too, grime, bacteria, and even death are intimately bound up with health and renewal. Fusing the commonplace and the profound, the material and the spiritual, the elegiac and the conceptual, Adorable powerfully insists that it is impossible to tell where death and life begin or end.

Praise for Adorable

Ida Marie Hede's Adorable is this incredible, tiny, undead person you can possess and make mouth subconscious astonishments. The transubstantiation of book to wet undead joy comes from Hede's use of words for feelings and experiences fantastically resistant to representation. In its vivid wrangle, Hede's language blooms into dazzling gratuity by anaphoric increments, as it laps hungrily at death and toddlers and shit and grief and slime and herself. The whole thing glistens and then spontaneously incorporates

– Ed Atkins

A teeming, fluid book wet with leaking bodies, influences, concerns, memories, moods. Hede's defamiliarising creation brims over with love and broaches our consciousness, making our own world hot and sticky. Viscerally apt reading for the fraught era we find ourselves in: obsessed with contagion and encroachment, yet besotted with connection and touch

– Jen Calleja

Adorable pulls us between wanting to live and having to die, between child found and parent lost, feeling from inside Hede's brain-womb all that hide and seek within the concaves of living rooms, telephone calls, and other skins. An urgent, brutally tactile novel that grows boundless in the mind, Adorable achieves life

– Mara Coson

The reality of bodily fluids is so incisive that what first seems shocking becomes part of the narrative arc, the language of a strange other world. Is the setting of the book B's belly or her brain? Only a fool would separate the two in Hede's prose

– Full Stop

Adorable is the story of B, Q and their daughter Æ – one that transcends countries, genres, and is drawn with charm and poetry. Hede's analyses are profound and intellectual. She is unafraid to unpick the grotesqueness of humanity, coupling her descriptions with delicate observations on love and family.A fascinating and gripping read

– Lunate

Adorable is a lovely, creative take on both life and death – strikingly and effectively earthy, but also beautiful in its spun-out fantasies. It impresses particularly in its descriptions of young(est) childhood (and parenthood). The presentation is not straightforward, but there is a coherence to the whole, and certainly sufficient story, too, making for an engaging and stimulating work

– Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review

IDA MARIE HEDE (b. 1980) is the author of seven books and numerous plays. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Copenhagen and Goldsmiths College and graduated from the School of Creative Writing in Copenhagen in 2008. Hede has taught at Gladiatorskolen, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and is currently a creative writing lecturer at Johan Borup's Højskole as well as an art critic for Dagbladet Information. She has received the Danish Art Council's prestigious three-year working grant, and in 2018 Adorable was nominated for the Danish Critics' Prize for Literature.