Literature and Fiction · Hardback

The Book of Tilia

Norwegian title: Boken om Tilia

Silje Aanes Fagerlund

In The Book of Tilia we meet a woman who has become pregnant right before the end of a relationship. She decides to carry out the pregnancy alone, and all contact between herself and the baby’s father is ended. The novel is about the process the narrator goes through from the beginning of the pregnancy until the birth.

Using a direct and sincere language the novel circles around the movement from fear and insecurity to gradual feelings of safety, from ambivalence to happiness, from weakness to strength, from isolation to moving out into the world as an expectant mother, and from winter to spring, summer and early autumn, where spring coincides with a change in the narrator’s emotional life.

The Book of Tilia can also be considered a novel which deep down is about embracing life – and daring to explore the unknown.