Praise for What Kingdom

Gråbøl’s eye is unsparing and convincing, her prose vivid and alive… The narrator doesn’t deny that she needs help… But at the same time, she has questions: Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the line between trauma and treatment?... about the relationship between compulsion and compliance?... care and abuse?... between surrender and obliteration?

– Kirkus Reviews

It has been a privilege to read this extraordinary work. The unnamed narrator’s absolute vulnerability is transformed into compelling beauty by the authority and precision of her language. I love the pace of the writing. How, after a passage in which the raw pain and hurt break through into anger, a sentence of clear transcendent poetry can follow. The perfect emotional control is astonishing. It is a very exposing, brave book. It lays open the narrator’s frustration at her inability to be heard, to be considered, within the cold strictures of the institution where she passes her days: "the basis of our lives is powerlessness plus capitulation." I was riveted by the attention to detail – it demands our attention, in return; the objective way the narrator perceives the confined world she lives in, without a trace of self-pity, compels us to know she is speaking the truth. There is an urgent need for the system to be changed, for an individual to be listened to, not just dealt with. This book makes us listen

– Celia Paul

An incredibly moving and gripping novel... so sure-footed, clear, vibrating, like chiffon or a cigarette

– Olga Ravn

Rendered through recursion and fragmentation, the wholeness of What Kingdomis revealed like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces are kept in a shoebox and turns out to have no edges. Somehow both warm and cool, Fine Gråbøl’s keenly observant prose suggests the affinities between phantasm, phenomena and what lies between. Bureaucracy and self-inflicted burns—the banal and the brutal—are reported with the same attenuated precision. Only an unreliable narrator could be trusted with this story. This book has gotten inside me, a guide for unexplored rooms and corridors. 

– Anne de Marcken

This debut novel centers around the minute day-to-days of a patient in a mental hospital. Gråbøl, a Danish poet beloved by the likes of Olga Ravn and Celia Paul, weaves an intricate picture of a life lived under rules and restraint by creating a text that is simultaneously demure and porous, with an elliptical structure

– Dilara O’Neil, Vulture

Gråbøl offers a searing critique on the way the government treats the mentally ill… Our narrator is preoccupied with the furniture. For her, chairs ‘address the night’, and this is a vital observation. Our protagonist notices everything. While we never get her name, the reader understands her survival is dependent on discovering herself through these inanimate objects… What Kingdom is a wonderful debut… a modern day classic; one I will return to time and time again

– Courtenay Schembri Gray, The Maple Moon

In Fine Gråbøl’s vital contemporary novel, the mind is kept just above water . . . Fine Gråbøl’s portrayal of this inner tension is incredibly nuanced and highly sensitive . . . The novel is both poetic and matter of fact. Heartbreaking and critical. Complex, in other words – just as life is

– Bogforum Debut Prize Jury

Utterly original in its poetical precision. Clinically clear with restrained panic . . . The at once gracefully poetic and unsentimental tone renders Gråbøl’s novel into an experience . . . of mental illness one could keep quoting from. 

– Information

Poetic and well-composed debut novel that critically takes on the way we view mental illness . . . There is a lot here that one could think about and discuss.

– Litteratursiden