Product Description

Now?an Academy Award-winning major motion picture starring Academy Award-winners Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander and directed by?Academy Award-winner Tom Hooper???

National Bestseller * A New York Times Notable Book * Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction * Winner of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters * Finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award * Finalist for the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award

Loosely inspired by a true story this tender portrait of marriage asks: What do you do when the person you love has to?change?? It starts with a question a simple favor asked by a wife of her husband while both are painting in their studio setting off a transformation neither can anticipate.? Uniting fact and fiction into an original romantic vision The Danish Girl eloquently portrays the unique intimacy that defines every marriage and the remarkable story of Lili Elbe a pioneer in transgender history?? and the woman torn between loyalty to her marriage and her own ambitions and desires.? The Danish Girl??s lush prose and generous emotional insight make it?? after the last page is turned?? a deeply moving first novel about one of the most passionate and unusual love stories of the 20th century.

Amazon.com Review

Though the title character of David Ebershoff's debut novel is a transsexual?? the book is less concerned with transgender issues than the mysterious and ineffable nature of love. Loosely based on the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener who?? in 1931?? became the first man to undergo a sex-change operation?? The Danish Girl borrows the bare bones of his story as a jumping-off point for an exploration of how Wegener's decisions affected the people around him. Chief among these is his Californian wife?? Greta?? al"r?? who unwittingly sets her husband's feet on the path to transformation. While trying to finish a portrait of an opera singer who has cancelled a sitting?? she asks Einar to stand in for her subject?? putting on her dress?? stockings?? and shoes. The moment silk touches his skin?? he is shaken:

Einar could concentrate only on the silk dressing his skin?? as if it were a bandage. Yes?? that was how it felt the first time: the silk was so fine and airy that it felt like a gauze--a balm-soaked gauze lying delicately on healing skin. Even the embarrassment of standing before his wife began to no longer matter?? for she was busy painting with a foreign intensity in her face. Einar was beginning to enter a shadowy world of dreams where Anna's dress could belong to anyone?? even to him.

Greta soon recognizes her husband's affinity for feminine attire?? and encourages him not only to dress like a woman?? but to take on a woman's