The journalist, film critic, author, researcher, and left-wing radical activist Wenche Blomberg left many imprints on Norwegian society. She also left her mark on her only child, her daughter Hilde Charlotte. This is a novel about what it was like to grow up as a so-called "ml-kid" (child of Maoist-Leninist activists) in the 70s. The author tells, both poetically and realistically, about a dominant mother and an unusual and difficult childhood and youth.

After her mother's death, Hilde Charlotte seeks out Wenche's private archive at the National Library. There she finds, among other things, her mother's diaries dating back to 1963. The weeks she spends going through the archival material give Hilde Charlotte new insight. Her mother emerges with her whole self and her entire background.

I long for shipwrecks and sudden death is a shocking, yet also a reconciling novel about a different kind of mother/daughter relationship.