He Who Saw The Deep by Selja Ahava is travelling to Denmark, where it will be published by Jensen & Dalgaard, marking the second foreign deal for this title.
Selja Ahava‘s He Who Saw The Deep is on a roll: Jensen & Dalgaard has secured the Danish rights to the title, which has already travelled to Poland.
He Who Saw The Deep is an exploration of two themes central to the human experience: love and mortality. The narrator is Liisa, a middle-aged woman in whose family people tend to die young and who has found love with her husband Henrik later in life.
As Liisa’s only living relative falls deathly ill and Henrik is away, Liisa copes with her fear by writing stories that give her a chance to explore the idea of mortality and the – impossible – pursuit of immortality. The stories follow situations where the line between life and death, the dead and the living, is walked, observed, and redrawn. The structure, in which fragments of myths, stories, and other media are weaved together, results in a modern rhapsody that nods at ancient myths like the Epic of Gilgamesh, that also gives the book its title.
Selja Ahava has established herself as a prominent literary voice in the Finnish scene: her Things That Fall From The Sky won the EU Literature Prize and has been sold to 28 territories, and her production is read with enthusiasm in Finland, where her work are published by Gummerus.
Congratulations to the author and the publisher!