On the Other Side Is March

I'm a woman in my early sixties. Somewhere between late and never. No longer the career woman, mother, housewife, and lover doing it all... Now I'm wife, mother, grandmother and my mother's mother. But I still have to satisfy all the demands placed on me.

So begins Sólrún Michelsen's tender and darkly witty exploration of what she considers to be the strange, remaining leg of life's journey. Her kids are grown and out of the house and she's faced with a time that, for years, she always seemed to be looking toward--a time when she wasn't needed by somebody or something. But now, with her mother's declining health, she finds herself revisiting childhood scenes, family hymns, and folk songs--revealing a lifetime of love, duty, awe, and regret. She tends to her mother amid the stark rhythms of Faroese life, waiting for a new nursing home that never arrives, and confronts the reality of being part of the "army of women" who inherit care. In her grief and private goodbye to her mother, however, is also a gorgeous meditation about life, as translator Marita Thomsen says in her afterword, "in its ragged mundane glory."

A lyrical portrait of caretaking and the invisible labor of motherhood, On the Other Side Is March is a tribute to caretakers across generational lines, as well as the rich oral traditions of singing and storytelling that kept the Faroese language alive centuries before its standard written form.

Sólrún Michelsen, born in Tórshavn, is a bestselling author known for her poetry, short stories, and novels for all ages. She won the Faroese Children's Literature Award in 2002 and the M. A. Jacobsen Culture Prize in 2008, and her novel On the Other Side Is March was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2015. Her recent works include a historical trilogy depicting the lives of women in the Faroe Islands, starting at the close of the nineteenth century.

Marita Thomsen is from the Faroes, where the wind often roars, and now lives in Keele, where it whispers. Her love of languages and stories has crystallized into English translations of Faroese authors, while her work as a conference interpreter satisfies her curiosity and wanderlust.