We Are Light

Shortlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award

Winner of the 2021 European Union Literature Prize

"A riveting experimental novel about a commune where the members’ belief that they can live on light and love alone proves fatal for one of them." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review

One apartment, three women, one man. One of the women is dead. When the emergency personnel arrive, they realize: Elisabeth starved to death, encouraged by her roommates.

In the middle of a summer night, Elisabeth, the oldest resident of the Sound & Love Commune, dies. Her sister Melodie and their two other housemates are arrested: the group’s attempts to stop eating and start living on light and love alone appears to have been fatal to Elisabeth. From unworldly idealists on the fringes of society, the three suddenly become suspects in a criminal case. Through the eyes of the night, the neighbors, doubt, the scent of an orange, and many other characters and entities, we see how each of those involved gives a different answer to the question of how Elisabeth came to die. Who is to blame? And does the commune still have a future? We Are Light is a highly original and entertaining novel about manipulation, vulnerability, and trying to be better.

GERDA BLEES
Gerda Blees is a Dutch author and poet. She taught at various universities for several years while doing linguistic research on Dutch-German lingua receptiva—conversations in which each person speaks their own language. We Are Light, Blees’s debut novel, won the EU Literature Prize as well as the prestigious Dutch Booksellers Award in 2021. It was also shortlisted for the Libris Literature Award. The author recently completed a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam while living with her family in Woerden.

MICHELE HUTCHISON
Michele Hutchison studied at UEA, Cambridge, and Lyon universities and worked in publishing for a number of years. In 2004, she moved to Amsterdam. Among the many works she has translated are La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Slaves to Fortune by Tom Lanoye, both Craving and Roxy by Esther Gerritsen, and Stadium IV by Sander Kollaard, for which she received the Vondel Translation Prize 2020. In the same year, her translation of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel The Discomfort of Evening was awarded the International Booker Prize. She also co-authored the successful parenting book, The Happiest Kids in the World.