Doghead

by Morten Ramsland

Translated from the original Danish by Tiina Nunnally

In the Eriksson family, childhood is a shocking experience, full of crude and disturbing rites of passage. It all started with Askild ‘the Crackpot’, chased by bloodhounds on a German plain after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp: he is a painter, a murderer and a thief.

His son, Niels ‘Jug Ears’ Junior, is born in an outhouse, wins respect by kicking other boys in the balls, and uses dynamite to blow up the privy when his father sells his cherished coin collection.

And his son, Asger ‘the Liar’, collects stories about his shipwrecked family which are always exciting though not entirely true. He is haunted by the time he spent hidden in the space under the stairs with his fat aunt, aka ‘the Little Bitch’. He has a confession to make and a buried treasure to find. Unable to banish Doghead, a horror from his childhood, to the shadow realm, he reveals the very bad deeds children can do – to push his family story forward, past a point of no return.

Doghead is a richly imaginative farcical tragedy; a witty saga of three generations of wild Eriksson men. It touches on chilling themes – concentration camps, child abuse, alcoholism, rape – yet warmly celebrates the stories that hold families together.

(From Publisher).

Morten Ramsland, born 1971, has a degree in Danish and Art History. Doghead is his first book to be published in English. It became a huge bestseller in Denmark, and won four major literary prizes.

The narrator of this family chronicle is the young painter Asger, who tells the colourful and sometimes grotesque story or rather stories of his family combining psychology, storytelling and magic realism.

A fantastic tale of three generations, magical and grotesque at times and quite haunting.

This is an overwhelmingly powerful novel about an abnormal family, the story is fantastically written, richly imaginative with a lot of black humour in all the tragic stuff.