Iron Lung

Reviews / Votes

'Reading Iron Lung felt like remembering a past life, at once so foreign and familiar. With her lucid, pulsating sentences, as poetic as they are precise, Kirstine Reffstrup pierces a little hole in history and pulls a thin, but shining thread through it: a vital and very moving connection between two distant young children living at the edges of time and normality. The result is a wonderfully singular novel that is both historically rooted and full of queer fabulation, both violent and brimming with a desire for embodiment and connection.' - Jonas Eika, author of After the Sun

'What if bodies were not told as pathologies or perversions but rather as stories of spiders, rivers, eggs, and laboured breaths? With sensuous sensitivity, Iron Lung imagines the queer twinnings that arise between bodies cast aside by the twentieth century.' - Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho

'A wonderful book: writing which is so vital and so visual coupled with a story which is strange, psychedelic, precise and filled with melancholy. Virtuosic work.' - Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork

'As saturated with colours, sounds, scents,
tactile sensations and fantastic imagery as
hardly anything else I've read ... Reffstrup's
prose is like a magic carpet, delicately woven
with the finest threads. 5/6 star.' - Politiken

'A magical story of living in two worlds ...
Iron Lung lives and breathes precisely through
Reffstrup's sense of style and painterly ability
to create literary images. With this novel, she
shows her powerful, poetic voice. A writer
who isn't afraid to plunge into bold fantasies.' - Dagsavisen

'If you're a good enough writer, you can
persuade the reader to accept the most
incredible things ... Iron Lung takes us to
strange places, exploring different aspects of
humanity in poetic, hypnotic, sensuous prose
that makes the familiar unfamiliar and brings
the eerie close to us.'
- NRK