Mystery and Crime · Hardback

The Pact

Norwegian title: Pakten

Hans Olav Lahlum

“Closed on account of celebration!” reads a sign in a shop window in Oslo on Liberation Day, May 8, 1945. At Youngstorget, four young idealists with ties to the labour movement gather. Josef, Kristine and Martin are children of the working class and share a background in the Labour Youth Party, while Maud, from an upper-class family, has thrown herself into communist activism. The four are relieved that the war is finally over and full of hope for a new and better life.

Only weeks after the liberation, the four survive a life-threatening event together, which forces them to keep a dark secret. The pact they make that summer will shadow their lives for decades to come, even as each of them follows different political and personal paths in a rapidly changing Norway.

The Pact is the first installment in a gripping trilogy that follows Josef, Kristine, Martin and Maud into adulthood and through the post-war decades. Combining drama, social realism and elements of crime, it portrays both the turbulent private lives of its characters and the wider story of Norway’s political development in the aftermath of the Second World War.