Literary places in Marstal

We, the Drowned

Carsten Jensen

A century of seafarers from the little Danish town of Marstal on the island of Ærø, from the 1848 war to 1945, whose men sail the world's oceans and drown in them by the boatload while their women wait at home. Jensen roots the epic in the real port town, its harbour and shipyards, and follows its sailors, Laurids Madsen who went to heaven and came back, his son Albert, the boy Knud Erik, out to the far ports of the South Seas and into the U-boat wars of the Atlantic, and back to the widows of Marstal.

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