Jade Cat

“Brøgger’s lively and insightful novel chronicles the fates of the Jewish Løvin family as they endure the tragicomic events of the 20th century.” —Publishers Weekly

From Denmark to Riga and back, through two World Wars, to India and Afghanistan, to America as it was and as it is, and through boarding schools, mental hospitals, and almshouses for the poor, Suzanne Brøgger’s The Jade Cat is a sweeping family saga of almost limitless ambition.

At the heart of the narrative and of this Jewish family unit is the grandmother, Katze, and her memories. She tells the story from her patrician apartment in Copenhagen’s Gammel Mønt 14, where she has lived since the 1940s. It is a haunting portrait of the pride, conceit, grandness, and despair that has followed the Løvin family while the world outside the old apartment gradually fell apart. The family remains prey to drug addiction and suicide attempts. Some escape into sex, others into Evangelical politics or religion. With an unlikely but sympathetic cast of grotesques, this gripping saga of Danish highlife and lowlife through three generations of a tormented family is as diverse and uncompromising as William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits.

“The novel, unabashedly autobiographical, concentrates on the inheritances of character, courage, and nonconformity from one woman to another.” —Tablet

“[A] panoramic and often comic chronicle . . . A roman-fleuve of the Løvin family, based on memories and letters from Brøgger’s own family.” —The Telegraph

“A further index of this novelist’s originality and power.” —The Independent