Synopses & Reviews
From a major new international voice, mesmerizing, inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world.
Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine.
After the Sun opens portals onto our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalized world that’s both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika’s fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical — “as though the worlds he describes are being viewed through an ultraviolet filter,” in one Danish reviewer’s words — he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.
Review
“Political fictions aren’t supposed to be this personal. Satires aren’t supposed to be this heartbreaking. Surrealism isn’t supposed to be this real. Giving a damn isn’t supposed to be this fun. From slights of hand, to shocks to the heart, After the Sun is doing all the things you don’t expect it to and leaving a big bold mark in what we call literature.” Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Review
“Urgent, deliriously discomforting... Eika holds nothing back in his fiction, he goes into the tightest of spaces and most intimate and terrifying of moments in order to breakthrough to places few have been before — or even imagined existing.” —Refinery29
Review
“Gripping... The global reach of these stories underscores the universality of the alienation that these characters endure. And the surreal debris Eika evokes from the fallout of capitalism has its own resonance.” Booklist
Review
“Striking literary craftsmanship in an experimental mix of shock-lit, sci-fi, dada and Joycean glints presented as loose time scenes that slide in and out like cards in the hands of the shuffler. By the end, this reader had the impression of having been drawn through a keyhole.” Annie Proulx, author of Barkskins
Review
“Jonas Eika blew the doors and windows of my imagination open, and now there is a galaxy in my head and a supernova in my heart. After the Sun vibrates with the aftershock of capitalism and reality flux. Its characters confront the world we’ve made as if they are facing off with ex-lovers who won’t leave, caught at the instant before they will either flame on or flame out. Thrilling.” Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water
Review
“Eika’s prose flexes a light-footed, vigilant, and unpredictable animalism: it’s practically pantheresque. After the Sun is an electrifying, utterly original read.” Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
About the Author
Jonas Eika is one of Denmark’s youngest and most exciting writers. His debut novel, Marie House Warehouse, was awarded the Bodil og Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize for emerging Danish writers in 2016. After the Sun has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Nordic Council Literary Prize in 2019. He lives in Copenhagen.