When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl's Book

An unflinchingly raw and lyrical exploration of a mother’s grief and how it transforms her relationship to time, reality, and language.

In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt’s twenty-five-year-old son, Carl, died in a tragic accident. When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back chronicles the few first years after that devastating phone call. It is at once a sober account of life after losing a child and an exploration of the language of poetry, loss, and love.

Intensely moving, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back explores what it is to be a family, what it is to love and lose, and what it is to treasure life in spite of death’s indomitable resolve.

Hardcover publication date: September 3, 2019

Paperback publication date: April 6, 2021

Dimensions: 5 x 7.75

Page count: 152 pages 

Hardcover ISBN: 9781566895606

Paperback ISBN: 9781566895934

Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of eleven collections of poetry, a novel, and three short story collections, including Baboon, which won the 2008 Nordic Council Literature Prize, Scandinavia’s highest literary honor. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages.

Denise Newman is a translator and poet who has published four collections of poetry. She has translated two books by Denmark’s Inger Christensen. Her translation of Naja Marie Aidt’s short story collection Baboon won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize.

Finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction

Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in Translated Literature

Longlisted for the 2020 PEN Translation Award

A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2019

A Literary Hub Best Memoir of the Decade

"This book is an alchemical feat, giving shape to the most profound sense of absence. A stirring, inventive masterpiece of heartbreak."

—Kirkus, starred review

"A stunning evocation of life. . . . Aidt’s memoir is like broken glass, the shattered pieces singular in their form but each glistening, ready to cut."

—Los Angeles Review of Books

"This book does more than just plumb the depths of our emotions, it also serves as an affirmation: of family, of love, and of life."

—Nylon

“A brutal but also beautiful meditation on death that combines family archives and a chorus of literary voices, and with them composes an indelible ode to life.”

—Valeria Luiselli, GQ

“To read this book is to commune with Aidt and with suffering itself, a testament to Denise Newman’s dedicated and emotive work in translating it from the original Danish.”

—World Literature Today

“This beautiful, exquisitely made memoir is Didion 4.0.”

—Literary Hub

“A wild, sad howl for an unimaginable loss. A howl that comes from deep inside the heart of grief.”

—EuropeNow

“A beautifully fragmented and hope-filled book about embracing love and death.”

—BookRiot

“Devastating, angry, challenging, fragmented and filled with the beautiful hope that the love we have for people continues into the world even after they’re gone.”

—Culture Fly

"I’ve never read anything close to how beautiful and terrifying this book is about grief and about befores and afters.”

—John Freeman

“Aidt manages the emotionally impossible, sharing with the reader something of what it is to lose a child. A radiant book.”

—Rivka Galchen