Solveig's House

When Marianne, a retired doctor of sixty, returns to her dead mother's house in a small town on the Danish Limfjord, she expects to sort through a life and leave. Instead she finds a box of letters in the attic, decades of correspondence from the women of the town, each one holding a secret Solveig kept for them and never repeated.Then the women begin to arrive at the kitchen table.One by one, across a year of Tuesdays and Thursdays and unannounced afternoons, they come with their coffee cups and their coats on hooks and their hands pressed flat on the wood. They bring the collaborator's granddaughter and the schoolteacher's nothing and the husband three days dead in the bed. They bring the word cruel, spoken for the first time in forty years. And at the bottom of the box, in a sealed envelope addressed in her mother's hand, Marianne finds the one letter Solveig never sent, the one that explains everything.Solveig's House is a novel about what women carry and where they set it down. About listening as a vocation. About the table that holds it all.