Five young Greenlanders sail the treacherous seas of love and nightlife in Niviaq Korneliussen's marvelous debut, Last Night in Nuuk. Fia can't figure out why she loathes her attentive boyfriend until she meets the most beautiful woman she's ever seen. Inuk struggles to reconcile his sister's sexuality with the strictures of Greenlandic identity. Meanwhile, the tension between Ivik and her girlfriend, Sara, is becoming too much for them to bear, and Arnaq's loose lips threaten to sink them all.
With breathless scenes that overlap and double back, adding insight and nuance to each character's circumstance, Last Night in Nuuk reads like the dreamy recollections from a rowdy weekend clubbing. Stream-of-consciousness anxiety in Fia's section gives way to aching correspondence and confessional diary entries in Inuk's, and static-charged text messaging in the others'. Hope and infatuation cloud over with self-doubt and regret. But mistakes and betrayal soon disentangle into fresh new perspective on who each is and what they want.
Korneliussen's lean, heterogeneous prose captures the confusion, tenacity, rage and blessing of queer lives in flux. "I'm terribly homesick but don't know what sort of home I'm longing for." Amid the ambivalence of fear and desire, however, there is an unwavering compassion that blooms over the course of that spring. By the summer's end, nothing will be the same for Fia, Inuk, Arnaq, Ivik and Sara, but in Korneliussen's capable hands, the reader may find their courses gently turned toward home. This novel is an utter delight. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness