Flower Valley

Flower Valley is a beautiful area of eastern Greenland, but the bottom of the valley is thick with crosses and graves laid with plastic flowers. Many of the graves commemorate suicides, in a country where the suicide rate is at an epidemic level, and nobody talks about grief or the desperation that precedes the deaths of these people. 
In the novel we follow a young woman in the final months before she kills herself. She has a girlfriend that she really loves, Maliina. Her family is caring – maybe too caring. She is due to start her studies in Denmark soon. And yet she feels out of place: in the wrong body, in the wrong family. And she keeps seeing broken hearts on Facebook that presents the news of more and more suicides amongst the young. We follow the woman from a time in her life when the world seems open up to her, and watch it grow darker and more and more restricted, till she takes the final leap to her death.
Flower Valley addresses a profoundly urgent topic. It is a powerful love story about how everything can dissolve into nothingness, and all at once, the road into darkness appears to be a viable option.

About the author 

Niviaq Korneliussen is a ground-breaking literary voice from Greenland. She made her debut in 2014 with her novel HOMO sapienne (published in the UK as Crimson, trans. Anna Halager in 2018), a generational portrait in which she explores homosexuality and identity – entirely new subject matter for Greenlandic literature. With its taboo-breaking and experimental content and structure, HOMO sapienne put Korneliussen and Greenland on the literary map, and in 2015 it was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Translation rights to her debut have been sold to 12 countries so far.

Text translated by Denise Rose Hansen