Nominated for the Brage Prize and the Youth Critics’ Award for her debut How Long Do We Last, Mari Andreassen returns with a luminous novel about youth, friendship and first love set in a small coastal town near Tromsø in the 1990s.

Do you remember? The fumbling hands, the smell of cheap perfume and bad breath. Slow dances. Notes passed across the classroom. Vodka and orange juice. The first kiss, the first heartbreak. The friends who carried you through it and the ones who didn’t.

This is the story of a circle of friends growing up in the north: Ajjo with a scar from a fishing hook, Krissa with the gap-toothed grin, Ørjan in his army cap and June and Petter, whose love burns brightest of all.

Now, decades later, Petter is forty-five, divorced, and struggling to connect with his teenage son. When he attends the funeral of his old teacher, memories surge back with disarming force – of friendship, desire, shame and the moment everything changed.

Told with tenderness, warmth and piercing honesty, this is a radiant portrait of adolescence, that fleeting time when we feel everything for the first time, and think it will last forever.