Literature and Fiction · Hardback

Boy

Norwegian title: Gutt

Eivind Sudmann

Mikael is 17 years old and shouldn't be here. He knows this. That is, he shouldn't be here, in a general sense, as the coincidence he is, and he shouldn't be here specifically, in this garden in the west of Oslo, standing and waiting on an early November morning. Who or what he is waiting for, the reader doesn't immediately know, but already in the first sentence the sense of something unsettling is evident. Mikael is simply on his way off the cliff, and slowly but surely the novel counts down to an event that shouldn't happen. With clear nerve and stylistically assured writing, the novel closes in on Mikael. Through his gaze, we see a world that most people will perceive as both alien and hostile, where the dark corners of the internet have the power to define. Define what it means to be a man and a woman, what a good life is, and when it's time to end it.

Boy is an explosive and poetic short novel about loneliness and trauma, how grief turns into anger, and the destructive mechanisms that make a 17-year-old boy surrender to the darkness that grows inside him.