Hunger

Hunger is a novel about what fertility treatment does to a human being, a woman, an artist, a girlfriend, a body.

Mia and Emil have been trying to have a baby for a year and are now starting fertility treatment. Emil has two children from a previous relationship. Mia is a writer and has always known that she wants to be a mother. She begins to write as she embarks on a course of treatment that is becoming increasingly intrusive and that threatens to pull everything apart. She writes from a place of fever, a rising madness and with a burning sense of necessity. Over the course of nine months, she writes in buses, waiting rooms, on the couch.  As her writing grows and becomes a salvation, it also brings further unrest into the relationship. Can one be uncompromising both in art and in love? Hunger is interested in what it means to be in woman and in the way society portrays and perceives infertility.

Praise for HUNGER:

"A dark novel about the desire for a child. And an exaltation of the women who have otherwise been scorned - bonus mothers, stepmothers and childless women ... It feels crucial to be able to read about love in the blended family ... A gripping novel."

— Politiken

"An honest and detailed story about what it's like to want a child more than anything else, and how it can almost feel even lonelier to yearn when your partner already has children... A beautiful and trembling portrait of a person who lives with a life dream that won't come true. For those who can mirror themselves in a story about involuntary childlessness." 

— Jyllands-Posten

"A refined interweaving of autofiction and human drama." 

— Kristeligt Dagblad

"This is the best book about infertility and IVF that I have ever read. [...] This diary is angry, desperate, brutal and at the same time poetic, delicate and clever. A masterpiece!"

— Emotion

"This remarkable novel tells Mia's story in a radically subjective way, while also filling a gap in the discourse on motherhood and identity. It is so brave and important because Mia, and by extension Tine Høeg, show themselves to be vulnerable."

— Deutschlandfunk Kultur

"Here in Switzerland, too, one wishes the book many, many readers, because it is by no means only about motherhood, but about love, death, being a woman, a man and a human being."

— Die Welt

"The Danish author Tine Høeg describes what it means to go through such a treatment – psychologically, physically and socially – so intensely that it blew me away." 

— BRIGITTE