IN A BROKEN WORLD, NOT FITTING IN IS A PRIVILEGE
The Yard is the first volume of the Tue Trilogy, the work with which Thomas Korsgaard has shaken contemporary Danish literature and which was awarded the De Gyldne Laurbær Prize and the Otto B. Lindhardt Prize in 2021.
Tue lives with his family on an isolated farm at the end of a dusty road. The world around him is harsh and precarious: breeding dogs, cows, dead animals piled up in the yard, a quick-tempered father obsessed with obituaries, and a silent mother who spends hours playing cards online. Breakfast is hard bread with butter and sugar. Money is scarce, and survival depends on small hustles, makeshift sales, or occasional thefts that, from time to time, allow a toast with a bottle of cheap wine and pretending that life is something else.
Amid this impoverished rural landscape, Tue watches, imagines, and endures. His creativity and wit become an intimate refuge, the only way to bear an environment that offers no comfort. Through everyday scenes, Korsgaard builds a fragmentary and precise narrative, where the seemingly trivial reveals deep tensions and where desire appears in a hidden way, never fully named, but always present.
With prose that combines harshness, humor, and unexpected tenderness, The Yard transcends rural realism to become a powerful portrait of childhood, poverty, and the ability not to give up. An intense and bright novel about growing up on the margins and learning to breathe within a world that seems to leave no space.
