Literature and Fiction · Hardback

House and Car

Norwegian title: Hus og bil

Aksel Selmer

Willy has just buried his father. Now he is an orphan. He misses his mother intensely, but feels relieved that his father is dead. Now Willy imagines a future with Aud, his father's fiancée, whom he is very fond of, in the house he is going to inherit, but Aud has sick parents to take care of. Furthermore, she thinks Willy is behaving too familiar with her. Consequently, Willy lives mostly alone in the big house. He isolates himself more and more, even though he and his friend Stein occasionally go on trips in his father's Mercedes.

Willy visits his mother's grave to talk to her, he makes himself drinks and shows up drunk at school. He locks himself in the bathroom and continues drinking and self-harming and tries to figure out how to die. He is sure that it is his turn now, as long as he has lived with death by his side, how familiar they have become.

House and Car is an intense, gripping and painful story about loneliness, about clinging to life, about enduring and desperately searching for hope in a sometimes hopeless existence. It's a free-standing sequel to Suit and Tie (2022).