You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
On a remote farm in northern Norway, eighty-year-old Anna Neshov is rushed to hospital after suffering a stroke. Her three sons have not spoken in some time. Margido, a devout Christian, works in Trondheim as a funeral director. Erlend, a successful window dresser, lives a life of luxury in a penthouse in Copenhagen, while Tor, the eldest brother, remains rearing pigs on the decaying family farm. Aware of her failing health, the trio reluctantly reunite over the winter holidays, where unexpected guests and the question of inheritance prompt the revealing of some bizarre, and devestating, truths. Winner of the Riksmål Prize in Norway.
WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY'S NORDIC PRIZE 2017 'He’s a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that’s serious literature' Haruki Murakami ‘An utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer’ James Wood 'Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist' Per Petterson 'Dag Solstad serves up another helping of his wan and wise almost-comedy' Geoff Dyer 'He doesn’t write to please other people. Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea...the drama exists in his voice' Lydia Davis Bjørn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for h...
This novel is a frank and vivid account of sexual awakening. A young woman spending her summer holiday in a seaside town is drawn towards an inevitable sexual encounter with the butcher she is working for. This volume also contains the stories Lucie's Long Voyage and The Fatal Bodice
Set in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century, Dina’s Book presents a beautiful, eccentric, and tempestuous heroine who carries a terrible burden: at the age of five she accidentally caused her mother’s death. Blamed by her father and banished to a farm, she grows up untamed and untaught. No one leads the child through her grief, and the accident remains a gruesome riddle of death, with Dina left haunted by the vindictive spirit of her mother. When her father agrees to take her back after several years, his efforts to cultivate her have little lasting effect. Tamed only by her tutor, who is able to reach her through music and draw out her gift for mathematics, Dina remains private and closely guarded, while her unconventional behavior and erotic power enchant and ensnare those around her. At age sixteen, she is married off to Jacob, a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, who later dies under odd circumstances. Wrestling with her two unappeased ghosts, Dina becomes mute and then emerges from her shock to run Jacob’s estate with an iron hand . . . until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer Leo, enters her life and changes it forever.
A happily married woman's perfect life shatters when her husband turns up dead hundreds of miles away from where he should have been, and she suddenly discovers that there was a part of him she knew nothing about. Alice Dupont’s perfect marriage was a perfect lie. When her husband, Chris, dies in a car accident, far from where he should have been, Alice’s life falls apart. After the police close the case, she is left with more questions than answers. While learning to cope with her loss and her new identity as a single mother of two, Alice becomes obsessed with unraveling the mystery surrounding her husband’s death and decides to start her own investigation. Retracing her husband's las...
Outlines the skills and techniques of providing superior customer service.
Faced with the tragic deaths of both her husband and baby, Jenny is at her wit's end, with nowhere to turn. She soon learns that her husband has left for her, of all things, a sheep-station known as Churinga, in the Australian Outback. Although she thinks his final gift to her a strange one, Jenny thinks she might find solace in a trip out to Churinga. After all, what better way to feel close to her husband now than to visit a place he loved? But, like the grief she has tried to leave behind, the Outback she encounters is barren and the weather, hostile; however, Jenny is not one to turn around. Once there she hears of Churinga's last keeper, Matilda, whose identity becomes less and less cle...
The first and only novel by Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013. 'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.' Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusi...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Flight Attendant comes a spine-tingling novel of lies, loss and buried desire—the mesmerizing story of a wife and mother who vanishes from her bed late one night. Gorgeous, blond, successful, living in a beautiful Victorian home in a Vermont village, Annalee Ahlberg has another side: at night she sleepwalks, and her affliction manifests in ways both devastating and bizarre. A search party combs the woods, but there is little trace of Annalee and her family fears the worst. Her daughter Lianna leaves college to care for her father and younger sister. She finds herself uncontrollably drawn to Gavin Rikert, the hazel-eyed detective investigating the case, and the two become involved. But Gavin seems to know more about Lianna's mother than he should. As Lianna sifts through the life Annalee has left behind, she wonders if the man sleeping next to her could hold the key to her mother's mysterious disappearance. Look for Chris Bohjalian's new novel, The Lioness!
A modern saga spanning the whole of the 20th century, by one of Iceland's most celebrated writers. At the beginning of this story there is death, and yet it is a celebration of life - the passion between a man and a woman, forbidden love, violence, sorrow, betrayal. Happiness and misfortune are passed down from one generation to the next. The sorrow over what was and what might have been weighs heavily on the characters and at the end of this chain, for now, stands Ari, on his way to his dying father, with a score still to be settled. The raw beauty of life is written into the dramatic Icelandic landscape, and into a society that has undergone great transformation within a century. In language both archaic and lyrical, and yet entirely contemporary and full of humour, Jón Kalman Stefánsson proves himself one of the finest European writers of his generation. A companion volume to Fish Have No Feet (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017). Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton