ABSTRACT
This chapter is a comparison between two contemporary novels set on opposite sides of the North Sea Basin, What I Was by Meg Rosoff and Mandø by Kjersti Vik. I argue that these two novels, chosen from a broad corpus of North Sea fiction written in the same period, are exemplary Anthropocene texts. I examine the way that marginal and marginalized landscapes can function as ecological sites of memory in literary texts, in particular their ability to transmit a sense of the planetary past that can provide us with orientation in the future. Although the novels are written in different languages and set on opposite sides of the North Sea basin, they are linked in landscape terms by their portrayal of a tidal causeway that both enables and hinders movement between the margins and the mainland.
