Press Reviews

• New Yorker

  ... A work of a strikingly modern sensibility. A stream-of-consciousness story of five queer protagonists confronting their identities in twenty-first-century Greenlandic culture

• Guardian

  Crimson transports us to a cold homeland where the blood runs hot

• BBC

  It has caused a stir . . . a candid commentary on the countries social issues

• Politiken (Danish Newspaper)

  This is unfiltered sexual realism... Niviaq Korneliussen's novel debut about existential pain and release, breaks and reconciliations, shows us how there are many possible roads to liberation, and it deserves to been known far and wide.

• litteratursiden.dk (Danish website)

  With just 171 pages it is a rather short novel, but what it lacks in volume it makes up for in raw masses of content and mediation. This is a wonderful mix of banging punchlines and poetry - it is well written and vibrant

• Trelleborgs Allehanda (Swedish newspaper)

  Korneliussen writes crushingly honest about sex, sexual assaults and social problems, but more than anything the novel is about being true to oneself

• Morgenbladet (Norwegian newspaper)

  Crimson is a novel about finding out who you really are, inside this demanding and lusting shell we call the body

• Kristianstadsbladet (Swedish newspaper)

  A wonderful novel debut about love and about standing out in Greenland. The book is both formalistically and linguistically exciting - and there are many moving scenes, among which a birth is very beautifully described

• Hufvudstadsbladet (Finnish newspaper)

  Alongside the five main characters you go through the full range of emotions. All is told with the intensity of the young, but what really gets you, is how difficult it is to be a homosexual in Nuuk... The five characters' many conflicting emotions and statements, their use of English phrases and rhetorical questions as well as the alternation between short powerful statements and long, rambling trains of thought, emphasize the dynamics and roughness of the novel

• Laline Paull, author of The Bees

  Crimson is written with immense courage - there's no faking the feeling of honesty on each page. It is a brave novel reminiscent of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting'

• Laline Paull, author of The Bees (Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction)

  Crimson is written with immense courage. There is no faking the feeling of honesty on each page and the palpable pain of self-discovery in youth. You can feel this writer's soul as she grapples with personal and national identity and conflict. It is harsh, tender, naked and without vanity - a brave novel reminiscent of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting

• Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure (Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize)

  Crimson is ferocious, inventive and unlike anything I've read in a long time. As the actions of the characters intertwine and impact on each other, it is both a raw and bold portrayal of young queer Greenlandic life and a study into the repercussions of finding yourself in a place where everybody knows everybody else

• Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

  Crimson combines the wit and brio of Conversations with Friends with the woozy cinematic hedonism of the Terrence-Malickesque Polish slacker film All Those Sleepless Nights to create a raw and riveting narrative that explores and ultimately celebrates queerness and Greenlandic youth culture. Effortlessly cool, funny yet sad, breezy but thoughtful - this is an edgy and unputdownable work of modern literature

• Sarah Ditum

  The Economist

  Crimson is a fizzing read about sex and identity set in Greenland . . . Frank, funny and warmly romantic, Crimson tells the story of five young people in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland and the author's hometown

• Stylist

  Crimson tells stories as old as time, of who loves who and why, but the way of telling is as new as fresh snow, or daybreak after an all-night party

• Lonesome Reader

  Korneliussen is a welcome new voice in global fiction not because of the specifics of her geography, but because she captures so perceptively and vividly the expansive heart of a new generation

• New Internationalist

  The struggles and concerns of the five young narrators in Crimson - identity, alcohol, belonging, friendship and sex - may be familiar to millennials across the Western world, but there is something reassuringly Nordic and noir about Niviaq Korneliussen's debut novel . . . Crimson is written in a direct, uncompromising, sometimes humorous style, complete with SMS chats and emojis and a healthy dose of profanities . . . Like me, you may never have read a novel by a Greenlandic author. This is a good, if unconventional, place to start

• Elle (Book Club Pick)

  She's been called 'the young queer writer who became Greenland's unlikely literary star' by The New Yorker, and this is the proof. The story of a group of friends coming to terms with their identities and sexualities in an Arctic town is beautifully told, in part using text messages

• Michael Schaub

  NPR.org

  Startling and beautiful . . . a heartbreaking yet hopeful look at what it's like to be young and queer in one of the most isolated places in the world . . . at once audacious and honest, sorrowful and triumphant, and Korneliussen seems certain to have a remarkable career ahead of her

• O Magazine

  A rising star of Nordic lit portrays the agonies and ecstasies of a joined-at-the-hip group of young, queer Greenlanders in a euphoric debut novel reminiscent of both Sheila Heti's formal experimentation and Eileen Myles's punk poetry

• The Times

  A very strange, intense Nordic version of Sex and the City

• HuffPost

  This cool, cool book is a single-sitting read if there ever was one