Ugly Fairytale: Fragments of desperation

About the book

A man lives alone in a northern country. He writes. He remembers. He tries to understand how he ended up here. Ugly Fairytale: Fragments of desperation is a fragmented work of autofiction about loneliness, poverty, depression, failure and the strange persistence of a person who has not quite disappeared. There is no conventional hero's journey. No easy redemption. No promise that everything will turn out well. Instead, the book moves through fragments of memory, observations, shame, anger, absurdity and moments of unexpected tenderness. Reality and fiction blur together as the narrator looks at his own life from a distance — sometimes with despair, sometimes with dark humour, sometimes with brutal honesty. Ugly Fairytale is a book about being left outside: outside success, outside certainty, outside the life one was supposed to have. It is also a book about writing itself — about what happens when a person turns his own life into material because he has no other way of looking at it. Raw, intimate and deliberately unconventional, Ugly Fairytale: Fragments of Desperation is for readers drawn to dark literary fiction, autofiction and experimental narratives about isolation and the human need to keep going.

What to expect