Minimalist but never austere, this mother-daughter portrait from the Danish author finds its power in everyday detail

The Danish author Helle Helle’s They, published in the UK in a pin-sharp translation by Martin Aitken, charts the subtle and shifting bond between a teenage daughter and an ailing mother in prose that is minimalist but never austere. It’s one of those novels where little is spoken but everything, by the end, gets said.

The unnamed mother and 16-year-old daughter live above a hairdresser’s in a Danish backwater on the island of Lolland, where nothing much goes on. They walk across the spring-awoken fields, they shop for groceries, they join an evening class. Details of their past are scanty, fugitive: a few house moves, but nothing about the daughter’s father, who exerts a vague apophatic presence. Mostly, they enjoy a frictionless, symbiotic closeness: “They sit by the window a lot, and on the settee, and with the free local weekly … They lift their mugs, sip synchronous mouthfuls.”