Synopsis: Bound by a vow made to her dying mother, Marianne sells her few belongings and leaves Grimsby for Denmark, to search for Lars Christensen, the golden-haired fisherman her mother fell in love with many years before.

Review: A debut novel with an unusual setting, and a universal theme. Although this is described as a historical novel, and many of the artists who people the novel’s pages were real members of the renowned Skagen Painters group (whose images might be usefully researched by readers to provide visual representation of the setting), Jensen’s young heroine and her closest friends are seeking something which extends far beyond any historical timescale - their identity.

Set for the most part in the tip of Denmark which faces Sweden, the novel describes not only the landscape with its enormous windswept beaches and treacherous seas, but the impact upon the otherwise generally limited aspirations of the inhabitants in a remote area which has a seasonal cultural influx - perhaps the nearest comparison UK readers might make would be with north Norfolk

Marianne tells her own story in the present tense, a difficult trick to achieve successfully, and surprisingly little late nineteenth century idiom strays into the narrative. This extends the universality of Jensen’s theme, and creates an atmosphere of immediacy which largely overshadows any historical setting.

Marianne is searching not only for her father – her unknown past - but for her future, and though initially unhappy in this community, she finds contentment in the simple life. This is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of the artists by the misinterpretation of her relationship with one of them, and by the vindictive behaviour of Hr Christensen, the man she assumes to be her uncle. In addition to the trauma of illegitimacy, which is dealt with through the experience both of Marianne and her friend Hannah, Jensen touches on a number of themes related to social deprivation, to fraught family relationships and to disability. Post-natal depression and drunkenness threaten the desperately impoverished family she lodges with, while asthma and excema prevent her ‘cousin’ Mikkel Christensen from following the family fishing tradition. His father ignores this, and also refuses to acknowledge his son’s intellectual aspirations until Hr Christensen faces his true responsibility to Marianne.

Rather frustratingly at the novel’s end we see Marianne herself, having decided to become an artist, agreeing to marriage, and although we are made aware that some married women successfully maintained their artistic careers, we wonder whether she, having been denied a proper family for so long, could resist the temptation to create her own at the expense of her own artistic ambition.

2008-01-20