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Longlisted for The Millions Best Translated Book Awards for Fiction Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature Four siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different-a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured. Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman's struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth's novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.
A passionate and groundbreaking bestseller from one of Norway’s most highly-regarded and award-winning novelists, for readers of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion and Coco Mellors' Cleopatra and Frankenstein A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death. So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.
A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middleaged artist and her aging mother, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controverdsial modern classic, Will and Testament 'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art.The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought aboiut a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonius absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.
A “gripping, inspiring, and politically revolutionary” novel about loneliness, inadequacy, and connection, set against the backdrop of the Norwegian postal service—for fans of Nicole Krauss and Sheila Heti (Vanity Fair). From the prize-winning Norwegian author of Will and Testament, longlisted for the National Book Award. Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she’s not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognize the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she’s ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months. This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth’s trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.
Longlisted for the National Book Award Four siblings, two summer houses, one terrible secret—the “prickly, persuasive” bestseller from one of Norway’s most celebrated novelists, perfect for readers of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard (New Yorker) “ . . . Hypnotic. Hjorth works finely parsed and brilliant variations on her unrelenting theme of familial mistrust and misunderstanding.” —New York Times When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningf...
Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months. This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth's trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.
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