Literature and Fiction · Hardback

Do You Remember?

Norwegian title: Husker dere?

Ellen Mari Thelle

What is a family if not the stories we tell about it? What is a mother to her children, and what are children to their mother, if not an ever-changing, yet carefully preserved narrative? We ask if we remember things that we know perfectly well we remember. So that we can retell the same stories. So that we can perhaps express how important others are to us. And how much we wish them well.

In Do You Remember? Ellen Mari Thelle writes about a mother who corresponds with her husband and four children about everything she remembers, asking: Do you remember too? She writes about stars and insect hotels. About trees and stair steps and funerals. And about grandmother before she began to forget. In a perhaps futile attempt to capture that invisible quality we like to call belonging. Or love. Or meaning. In a dangerously restless, yet also beautiful world.

Do You Remember? is a touching novel about all that we carry within us that weighs nothing – who we are, and what we share together.