The Summer of Ellen

One evening in Copenhagen, architect Jacob Nielson, the embittered, alcohol-fueled, middle-aged narrator of this bleak standalone from bestseller Friis (the Nina Borg series with Lena Kaaberbøl), shows up at the building where his ex-wife, Kirsten, lives and buzzes her apartment. Not surprisingly, Kirsten doesn’t let him in. Soon afterward, Jacob receives a phone call from his great-uncle Anton Svenningsen, who lives on a farm in Djursland and with whom he’s been out of touch for years. Anton wants his help finding a missing woman named Ellen, and Jacob agrees to return to the farm. Jacob hasn’t spent time in that part of Denmark since the summer of 1978, when he was an excessively autoerotic 15-year-old obsessed with Ellen, a member of a hippie commune, and with the unsolved disappearance of a friend’s sister. Friis alternates between that summer and Jacob’s present-day search for Ellen, with the emphasis on the dual story of Jacob’s coming-of-age and his midlife crisis. Mainstream readers who can relate to the self-pitying Jacob will be most rewarded. (May)