Heart Undercover contains nine essays on art, literature, film, inspiration and writing. Through occasionally personal, poetological research and readings of authors and artists such as Edvard Munch, Nikolai Astrup, Mary Ruefle, Claire-Louise Bennett and Andrei Tarkovsky, the texts revolve around literary transformation points, abstraction and realism, creation and re-creation. If Heart Undercover is an associative, momentary memoir about, for example, standing up to your knees in ice-cold dirt, it is also about work in the first-person singular, about dramaturgy, and about comedy.

In her third collection of essays, Gunnhild Øyehaug delivers a rich, thought-provoking and poetic reflection on literature’s capacity for both fantastic transformation and for holding on tight to something imagined, lived and experienced.