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Children's Books902Literature and Fiction722Narrative Non-fiction336Self Help179Crafts and Hobbies146Mystery and Crime143Cook Books107UpLit82

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240 titles in the catalogue

Literature and Fiction2020–2024Clear all
Death at Work
Literature and Fiction2020 · 144 pp

Death at Work

Kristian Klausen

The artist Mark Rothko killed himself in 1970, leaving behind nothing but a collection of mysterious paintings. This novel takes the form of Rothko’s fictional suicide note, but from a completely different reality. He lives in the southeastern Norwegian city of Drammen. As does the artist Agnes Martin. Death at Work is an exploration of the possibilities of form; a removal of the boundaries between biography, art and fiction.

A Happily Married Man
12…17181920
Literature and Fiction2020 · 160 pp

A Happily Married Man

Odd Klippenvåg

A Happily Married Man and Other Short Stories deals with the topic of Love. In this collection of stories, the past appears in the shape of a Russian woman, a brother is puzzled by his sister not attending their father´s funeral, a man has his life changed after a shellfish dinner party, a widow is struggling with frustration as well as her conscience, a head teacher is unfaithful and an old man experiences sorrow, as a long relationship has run its course. Winner of The Norwegian Young Critics Award 2020.

Are You Happy, Sister?
Literature and Fiction2020 · 176 pp

Are You Happy, Sister?

Synne Sun Løes

When she was a baby, she was taken from an orphanage in South Korea and sent for adoption, to a new life in Norway. Twenty-six years later, a note turns up at the orphanage. It contains the name of her biological mother and father. They want to make contact. Now she is an adult, living an ordinary Norwegian life with her husband and two sons. It turns out that she has a sister one year younger than herself in Seoul. A single career woman who works from 09.00 to 23.00. Who is her sister and how does she live? Are they like one another? What have they chosen in life and what has been chosen for them? The two sisters start to write to each other. Are you Happy, Sister? is a powerful, gripping and humorous epistolatory novel about sisterhood and melancholy, about politics and everyday life in Norway and South Korea, about identity and belonging. And about the weight of love.

Is Mother Dead
Literature and Fiction2020 · 368 pp

Is Mother Dead

Vigdis Hjorth

Johanna, an artist, has spent the last three decades living in the US with her husband and their son. After her husband dies, Johanna returns to her native Norway. A gallery has invited her to create a retrospective exhibition, with a new, commissioned work as its centrepiece. Johanna rents an apartment by the fjord, and a small cabin in the woods on the outskirts of the city. As she traverses the city, back and forth between the two places, she searches for a sense of direction in the work ahead of her, and for a discovery to bridge her past to the present. What remains of the life Johanna left behind in Norway, several decades ago? What is she expecting to find upon her return? And what if that something should choose not to appear? Is Mother Dead is a riveting and immersive story about the most fundamental longings and disappointments of our lives. In her unmistakable voice, Vigdis Hjorth blends deep psychological insight and keen empathy with perspectives from art and literature. At the heart of this novel lies the question of what it means to come to terms with one’s past, when neither making amends nor letting go is an option.NOMINATED TO THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023NOMINATED TO THE NORDIC COUNCIL LITERATURE PRIZE 2021NOMINATED TO THE BRAGE PRIZE 2020NOMINATED TO THE NORWEGIAN CRITICS AWARD 2020NOMINATED TO THE NORWEGIAN YOUTH CRITICS PRIZE 2020NOMINATED TO THE SUBJEKT PRIZE 2020R E V I E W SIs Mother Dead is an intergenerational bust-up that sends sparks flying.It’s profoundly shocking, brutally honest, and intelligently conceived.The literary exploration of the mother-daughter relationship in Is Mother Dead is both universal and courageous – and delivered with linguistic aplomb and stylistic confidence displaying Hjorth’s usual quality.DAGBLADET (Norway)The relationship between mother and daughter could hardly be portrayed in a manner that is more critical and heart-breaking than Vigdis Hjorth does in her novel Is Mother Dead.Vigdis Hjorth proves herself yet again to be a great author.Beautifully modulated language, a sharp gaze, and the ability to depict, with merciless frankness and deep psychological insight, the central character (…)Hjorth has a unique ability to create both large and small canvasses with apparently simple means, alternating texts, some told almost in the language of riddles or as brief, poetic stanzas, rhymes, or recurring phrases (…)Is Mother Dead is superb writing, shocking, compelling and recognisable (…)This is a hard-core mother-daughter relationship in a form which is elegant and linguistically coherent.VG (Norway)Is Mother Dead is a brilliant, almost physically painful novel (…)BOK365 (Norway)Is Mother Dead is an important novel that reveals to us an artist’s inner processes that spark a debate.NRK (Norway)Vigdis Hjorth is back at her best, with a raw and painful book (…)Brave and uncompromising.DAGSAVISEN (Norway)A universal and powerful story about childhood wounds that never heal and a mother’s love that may not endure everything.Is Mother Dead is a strong and very good book.ADRESSEAVISEN (Norway)Vigdis Hjorth's Is Mother Dead is a brooding and searching novel that proves why she is among our very best.The book resembles a thriller; the crescendo is edge-of-your-seat literature. Hjorth is an expert in plotting and linguistic rhythm. Long sections are broken up by pages with plenty of air and low-key reflections, several of which you will return to and read again and again.(…) among her very best.DAGENS NÆRINGSLIV (Norway)With Is Mother Dead, Vigdis Hjorth has written one of the most exceptional and accurate accounts of loss that I can remember ever reading.The last 30 to 40 pages of Is Mother Dead are a crescendo of a very rare kind, and when I had read the last sentence my body reacted with a spontaneous gasp – of delight and amazement. Hjorth [has] written her finest novel yet. I will never forget Johanna.MORGENBLADET (Norway)[A] harrowing and propulsive novel about the strained tether between daughters and mothers…lucidly translated by Charlotte Barslund. Hjorth deftly conveys the psychological warfare of familial conflict in circuitous, searching sentences. Fragments replicate the stab of betrayal, run-ons rummage for truth amid lies.THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (USA)Hjorth delivers a gripping tale of obsession about an artist and her frayed relationship with her family. [She] keenly walks the line between Johanna’s concern and mania; as Johanna’s hang-ups occasionally spin out of control, they remain true to the character. This accomplished novel is hard to shake.PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (USA) Hjorth has masterfully written a family drama where no reunion takes place and a thriller where no blood is shed.PLOUGHSHARES (USA) Writing with a rush of anxious interiority beautifully reproduced by Barslund's translation, Hjorth spins out Joanna's hopes, fears, and half-suppressed memories in obsessive and propulsive run-on sentences, full of self-reflexive questions and crushing doubt...Is Mother Deadboth pulls readers into Joanna's adventure and calls on them to become more alive to their own task, their arms stretching upward for the next rung.ASYMPTOTE JOURNAL (USA)Is Mother Dead is thrilling work.(…) the novel feels liberating. In the struggle to break free, and in the impossibility of really breaking free, from our abusers and our own pain, there can be, in a hand as deft as Hjorth’s, an energy both creative and destructive.THE TELEGRAPH (UK), five/five starsThe strength in this fictional story stems, as it is in the best Nordic works of art (think of Ibsen, Munk, Bergman), from the authorial effort to represent a human existence lived consciously, which requires a strong emotional and intellectual will. Hjorth's prose is simple in appearance, as stated in the text, saying that reality, what we do every day to take care of ourselves, like doing the laundry, doesn't matter, as the essential truth is behind the facts.EL CULTURAL (Spain)In Is Mother Dead, Hjorth asks how we can ever draw a clear distinction between personal experience and a shared collective experience, between our own mothers and mothers as they have been depicted throughout history.THE BAFFLER (USA)

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023
Rights soldSold to 23 territories
Eventually the Eyes will get used to the Darkness
Literature and Fiction2020 · 176 pp

Eventually the Eyes will get used to the Darkness

Bruno Jovanovic

Damjan comes to Norway from Bosnia at the age of four. With a mentally ill mother and as a gay adult man, he has really learned what it means to be an outsider in Norwegian society. Now his mother moves into his flat, but Damjan cannot share all the difficulties with his boyfriend Filip. A ruthless debut novel about the costs of being an outsider and the things that bind us humans together, in spite of it all.

Rights soldSold to Denmark
ABC of Talking Shop
Literature and Fiction2020 · 112 pp

ABC of Talking Shop

Flu Hartberg

Flu Hartberg’s drawings have made their mark on Norwegian newspapers for many years. An ABC of Talking Shop brings together some of her best strips, sorted in a way that offers insight to the new Norway. Separate pages for each letter help readers navigate our strange, sometimes tragic and always comical culture. An ABC of Talking Shop is the perfect gift for anybody who wants a good laugh – but also a new perspective on our times.

Fly, Butterfly
UpLit / Literature and Fiction2020 · 320 pp

Fly, Butterfly

Annicken R. Day

Maya Williams is an ambitious, hardworking New York Business Woman, stymied on her way up the corporate ladder by sexist, male executives. But when she is sent to a conference in Hawaii and expected to lie on stage, she does the unthinkable – she tells the truth. After the event she has a break down on the beach, and then decides to stay in Kauai´i for a few days. After all: she was just fired. In Kauai´i she meets people who open her eyes to different ways of thinking and being, she begins to see life, work, love – and her self – in a whole new light. She learns how to chill, to breathe and to be more in the moment. All of a sudden she has a vision of wanting a life that might be totally different from what she thought. When Maya returns to the corporate world as an executive, can she implement her new philosophies and still succeed? And will her personal and professional metamorphosis ultimately bring her the happiness and freedom that she dreams of?Fly, Butterfly is a page turner that draws you in and makes you nod furiously, laugh deeply and then sob with empathy. This is a powerful novel that has the energy to inspire change. Amy Brann - Author of Engaged, Make Your Brain Work and Neuroscience for Coaches. Annicken R. Day has a gift for transforming bureaucrazies into businesses that buzz with creativity and joy. With her debut novel, she shows that she also has a knack for crafting stories about transforming ourselves. Adam Grant - New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take.

Rights soldSold to Germany
Negotiating with Reality
Literature and Fiction2020 · 200 pp

Negotiating with Reality

Erlend Loe

“At first, I travelled on four wheels. Then three. Then, for a long time, two. Now: one. A reduction is under way. In the end, in some years’ time – nobody knows how many – I’ll have no wheels. And will return to the earth I’ve loved cycling on. I never would have believed I could do it, but now I fly low across the landscape. My eyes are 220cm above the earth and the trees whizz by. The path beneath me is soft, everything is soft, even if, now and then, it is also stony and uneven. Sometimes it is wet and slippery. Regardless, I must be fully in control, from second to second. An elevation there, a stone, a root, a puddle that may be deeper than it appears to me. I could fall at any moment. But I don’t fall. Because I can fly. But now and then I do fall all the same. Or jump off to avoid falling.” For much of his life, Erlend Loe has cycled. A year ago, he decided to try out a unicycle and was instantly converted. What persuades an almost two-metre tall fifty-year-old who claims not to like standing out from the crowd to cycle through the city on a unicycle? What is so attractive about that? There must be more practical means of transport? With enthusiasm and sharp observational skill, Erlend Loe takes us on a unicycle odyssey over the course of a year – full of free association and playfulness, but always in balance, always leaning forward, always conducting negotiations with reality. And by negotiating with reality, he puts it into words in new and unexpected ways. A riveting personal essay in the vein of On Being John McEnroe and Murakami’s What I Talk about When I Talk about Running.

Rights soldSold to Serbia and Turkey
Present
Literature and Fiction2020 · 112 pp

Present

Gro Dahle

Gro Dahle writes about Christmas in a way that makes it warm, to make it glitter. Christmas is the time for miracles and seven sorts of cookies and snow and break downs and walking the dog and presents and old quarrels and birth and tears. For the time around Christmas is so tight. Of expectations, joy and disappointments. Here are families gathering around a large table with many traditions. Here is Mary giving birth and not quite understanding how she could get pregnant. As always in Gro Dahles writing we find the ceremonial as well as the everyday-like, the beautiful and the painful, side by side. Merry Christmas to glittery woodsfull of snowstarry forest,glazed in frost. December woods heavy with fogwhere the moose celebrates Christmas, standing quitely between the trees,nightwet foreststriped with rain.

Witches and Birdwatchers
UpLit / Literature and Fiction2020 · 400 pp

Witches and Birdwatchers

Magne Hovden

Ragna Emanualsen got pregnant at a young age, and never had time to find out what she wanted to do with her life. Ragna and her football-trainer husband Rune, the local hero, have drifted apart. What’s more, she’s becoming increasingly convinced he’s keener on men than women. Everyday life is turning into a predictable routine of children and husband. An absurd coincidence convinces Ragna that she has healing powers, and she signs up for a group tour led by a shaman to Vardø, one of the world’s most powerful energy points. Tor Hellebust is longing for a break from his everyday life. His relationship with his wife Frida has cooled dramatically. Every day, Tor visits his senile mother at the nursing home, where he desperately tries to revive her memories. When Tor, a passionate birdwatcher, gets wind of a group tour to Vardø on an internet forum, he spies a chance to cross an extremely rare species, the cattle egret, off his observation list. In Vardø, tensions build between the two groups, which are both deadly serious about their passions.

Regards, Ruth
Literature and Fiction2020 · 160 pp

Regards, Ruth

Ingrid Tørresvold

It’s hot in the capital. Extremely hot. So hot that Oslo city council shuts off the taps to save water. So hot that people leave town. And further north in the country, the forest fires are spreading. There’s a state of emergency. In a small cafe in Oslo’s Veitvet district, 37-year-old Ruth stands sweating. She works here one day a week. It’s just a shame that nobody wants hot coffee in the heatwave. In the absence of customers, Ruth tries to make friends with her colleague Sofie instead. She has become pregnant and turns to Ruth for advice about what to do.But Ruth isn’t very comfortable with other people asking her for advice. Her psychologist sister Mari is the one who has set her the task of getting closer to other people. Mari calls Ruth a hedgehog: ‘You stick out your spines every time anybody comes near you. You’re scared other people won’t like you for who you are,’ she says. But Mari has previously called her sister an ostrich, a chameleon and even an earthworm without leaving Ruth any the wiser.Human contact has always been difficult for Ruth: once upon a time there was a friend, Gro, who shared everything with her. And there was a grandmother who loved to take Ruth to the funfair, who had soft hands and used to stroke the back of her grandchild’s hand when things got difficult. All this has gone, and Ruth now lives a stagnant life without much intimacy or socialising.Regards, Ruth is a subtle novel full of humorous and disturbing contrasts. Adopting a unique narrative voice, Ingrid Tørresvold conjures up a warm and tender portrait of Ruth and everything that is so difficult in her life, as the heat around her becomes more and more oppressive.

Don’t Let Go
Literature and Fiction2020 · 112 pp

Don’t Let Go

Trygve Skaug

A new poetry collection from Norwegian phenomenon Trygve Skaug is always a major event. In Don’t Let Go, Skaug writes about love, consolation and longing in a way that will resonate with many. Trygve Skaug is one of Norway’s best-selling poets. His last book, Pay Attention Now, has sold more than 9,000 copies to date. This much-loved poet has nearly 100,000 Instagram followers and touches the hearts of readers of all ages.