When Life Gives You Hippos is an uplifting, unforgettable novel about the pursuit of eternal love. It's about the endless nature of life with constant loss, but it still gives us another chance to make up for the one we missed. The saga is told through the eyes of a shy painter, Esther, encompassing the lives of three generations who lived under one roof.
When Esther's grandfather, Hannibal, bought a house on Palermo Road on the Danish island of Amager in 1921, he pictured in his imagination a picture of a house full of opera music, bohemians, and unconventional love that radiates from the Song of Solomon. But for his Russian bride, the circus acrobat Varnika, the age of miracles he had dreamed of had ended from the moment she saw her lover fall into the throat of a hippopotamus, a hippopotamus that was supposed to be an elephant so that the circus would be filled with the life of the huge elephant.