We, the Drowned

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.

Laurids Madsen

Marstal (the town)

1848

In Marstal, a town that lives entirely by and for the sea, Laurids Madsen becomes a legend when he is blown sky-high in the 1848 war and, as the town tells it, goes up to heaven and comes back down alive. From this first tall tale, Jensen spins a century of the town's men, bound by blood and boats to an element that will take most of them.

The opening

explicit The epic is anchored in Marstal, the real seafaring town on the Danish island of Ærø, whose sailors and ships fill the book; the town is its fixed home port.

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