Literature and Fiction / Mystery and Crime · Hardback

The Doll in the Ceiling

Norwegian title: Dukken i taket

Ingvar Ambjørnsen

Ingvar Ambjørnsen's first novel with a female protagonist is intense and uncomfortable, and holds the reader captive until the very end.

«Who am I, who cannot forgive? Who will not forgive? I am the one who walks the narrowest path. The most difficult. Because nothing is easier giving in and cancel another's debt.»

A psychological drama unfolds between a handful of people in a small town in Southern Norway. Rebekka is traveling back to the vacation landscape of her childhood. The reader follows the action through her perspective, where fond childhood memories and enigmatic, confusing images alternate.

Soon she gets to map out the small nuclear family that lives in a red-painted house in Stjernestien. An apparent idyll, which the reader realizes cannot last. Because there will be a landslide in this small town, a scandal will be smeared like graffiti on the walls, and it is Rebekka who is the trigger.