Published March 2027.

Maja is on the run. We meet her in Italy, looking out over the Ligurian Sea, and follow as she lets herself and her days slip into those of a man she barely knows, the Author. Maja and the Author are bound together by a tacit understanding and as they begin to grow closer Maja struggles to keep her past from intruding, rupturing the escapism of her dreamlike affair. As she boards trains, moves across beaches and through piazzas, the ‘crime’ she cannot return to remains in her apartment in Copenhagen, waiting for a resolution.  

With a deft poeticism and daring composure, Blue Sunset looks at grief, ‘that blue gleam’, and asks how one begins to remake a life against it. 

‘This slim novel should be read slowly because on every page there is a treasure: a strange thought that strikes like an arrow to the heart of a target, a surprising observation that nevertheless rings perfectly true, a discreet metaphor that seems to have been created for the first time. Hansen is so delicate, so singular, and so precise, that it seems as if she has only ever read the greatest poets.’  – Anne Serre, author of A Leopard-Skin Hat 

‘Blue Sunset streams onto the page in layers or sheets or waves, the emotional weather of the novel meeting the formations of sky, land, and sea. Sublime and inscrutable. In mourning, but alive.’ –  Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy 

‘A perfect novel, Blue Sunset is the sweet spot between Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Thomas Bernhard, eerie, beautiful, contemplative.’ – Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent 

‘A lush, atmospheric novella brimming with poetry, pain, and desire.’ – Kirkus Reviews  

Denise Rose Hansen is a Danish writer who lives in London. Founder of the award-winning independent press Lolli Editions, she is now an editor at Penguin where she publishes contemporary and classic fiction in translation. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Ache, ATLAS, and elsewhere.