Vivian

With Vivian, her second novel to be published in English, Christina Hesselholdt delves into the world of the enigmatic American photographer Vivian Maier (1926–2009), whose unique body of work only reached the public by chance. On the surface, Vivian Maier lived a quiet life, working as a nanny for bourgeois families in Chicago & New York. And yet, over the course of four decades, she took more than 150,000 photos, most of them with Rolleiflex cameras. The pictures were discovered in an auction shortly before she died, impoverished & feasibly very lonely. Who was this outsider artist, & why did she remain in the shadows her whole life? 

In this playful, polyphonic novel, we watch Vivian grow up in a severely dysfunctional family in New York & Champsaur in France, and we follow her later life as a nanny and street photographer in Chicago. A meditation on art, madness & identity, Vivian is a brilliant novel by Denmark's most inventive & radical novelist. 

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Financial Times Best Books of 2019

‘Vivian is a fascinating, ingeniously constructed piece of documentary fiction. The novel’s short sections illuminate Vivian Maier in brilliant flashes without ever dispelling her singular mystery.’ — Adam Foulds, author of Dream Sequence

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Christina Hesselholdt, born in 1962, studied at the Danish Academy of Creative Writing in Copenhagen. Her first novel, Køkkenet, Gravkammeret & Landskabet [The Kitchen, the Tomb & the Landscape], was published in 1991. She has written fifteen books of prose, & received critical acclaim & awards for her books, including the Beatrice Prize in 2007 & the Critics’ Prize in 2010. She was included in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2013. Companions is her first book to appear in English. Her latest work, Vivian, a novel about the photographer Vivian Maier, was published by Rosinante in 2016. It won the Danish Radio Best Novel Award 2017 & has been shor