‘Are you Anne-Sophie’s mum?’ 

‘Yes, I am,’ she said.

‘Are you sad about it?’

‘Yes.’

A sequence of seven haunting and gripping stories from the winner of the Danish Fiction Writers Prize.

Palpable and astonishing, Caroline Albertine Minor depicts lives as they piece back their sense of self, family, love, future – accruing and blending to form something unnameably greater.

Acclaim for Blessings 

'Beautiful, subtle, atmospheric; devastating and precise, yet so tender and generous, too. Minor finds pristine, humane, elegant, often hopeful and surprising ways to speak about grief, love and loss.' Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies

'In this collection of stories the lives of mothers and daughters are sketched with piercing attention, yet the mysteries at the centre of each character’s desires, losses and trespasses retain their depth at every turn. The effect is as chilling as it is expansive. There is not a word out of place.'

Hannah Regel, author of Last Sane Woman

Seven stories that resemble life itself, each so pulsating with a vivacity of its own that they create connections with the lives of the other stories through its use of a rich, nuanced style that is both clinically clear and marvellously suggestive.

Minor’s literary imagery is in a class of its own. She succeeds in depicting all this in her elegant, passionate, and unusually beautiful prose. Blessings has the potential to be one of the foremost works of Danish short prose in recent decades.

The Nordic Co-operation

It can be difficult to explain what it is about Blessings that makes its short stories so good. Scene by scene and sentence by sentence, Caroline Albertine Minor writes with impressive certainty, but above all she writes completely unobtrusively and effortlessly.

The Information  

Blessings is a magnificent depiction of grief. In this telling, what hurts the most is what remains.’

Litteraturmagasinet Standart

‘Caroline Albertine Minor writes with warmth and wisdom about the aimlessness of life.’

Politiken

‘Caroline Albertine Minor’s marvellous short stories explore what happens when human relationships are stretched to breaking point.’

Weekendavisen

‘Minor has produced something odd, in the best way—something that creeps in and makes this collection of short stories stand out from the crowd.’

Dagens Nyheter

‘The 2018 P.O. Enquist Prize goes to Caroline Albertine Minor, for her extraordinarily precise dissection of her main characters’ complex emotions and relationships in this series of elegant and moving stories. In Blessings, grief and loss are explored as part of everyday life. The existential weight of the stories is masterfully counterbalanced by stylistic lightness and assurance. In this her second book, Minor shows herself to be a writer of international stature.’

Jury statement for the P.O. Enquist Prize.

Caroline Albertine Minor has been nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize for Blessings (Velsignelser). She has won the P.O Enquist Prize 2018 as well as the Danish Fiction Writers Prize, the Michael Strunge Prize 2017 and the Special Award of the Danish Arts Foundation. 

Caroline Waight has been a finalist for the 2023 PEN Translation Award and received a special commendation from the 2023 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.