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The painter Peter Wihl - a celebrated success early in his career - is about to turn fifty. The prospect is stifling his creativity and jeopardising his preparations for a major new exhibition intended to revive his reputation. In a cruel twist of fate, his concerns about his forthcoming birthday are rendered meaningless when he discovers that he has an incurable eye condition and will be completely blind within six months. What is a painter without his eyes? A chance encounter with an old classmate leads a vulnerable Peter into a sinister world which will haunt him for as long as he lives. The novel poses the question: How far is the artist willing to go in the pursuit of his art?
At the end of World War II, twenty-year-old Vera is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that rape is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a talented boxer. Vera’s young son, Barnum, forms a special but bizarre relationship with his half brother, fraught with rivalry and dependence as well as love. “I should have been your father,” Fred tells Barnum, “instead of the fool who says he is.” It is Barnum, who is now a screenwriter with a fondness for lies and alcohol, who narrates his family’s saga. As he shares his family’s history, he chronicles generations of independent women and absent and flawed men whom he calls the Night Men. Among them is his father, Arnold, who bequeaths to Barnum his circus name, his excessively small stature, and a con man’s belief in the power of illusion. Filled with a galaxy of finely etched characters, this prize-winning novel is a tour de force and a literary masterpiece richly deserving of the accolades it has received.
'"Beatles" is the story of Kim Karlsen and his three buddies, Gunnar, Ola and Seb - and, yes, they occasionally like to think of themselves as the Fab Four. They were born in 1951, and the story starts with the first wave of Beatlemania in Norway, in the spring of 1965. Each chapter tales a different Beatles song (or, near the end, post-Beatles solo songs) as its title and theme - all the way through the winter of 1972. There's drinking (lots of it), football, some love-fumblings (Kim has two girlfriends that he has to semi-juggle) and the sort of minor adventures that are part of growing up. "Beatles" is a well-written account of a generation, and of growing up in a specific time. It feels very real' - "The Complete Review".
A jewel of modern Norwegian literature now hailed as Lars Saabye Christensen's crowning achievement - an intricate and utterly compelling narrative. "With its tonal nuance and quietly amusing melancholy, Echoes of the City confirms him as one of Norway's finest writers" Guardian "[A] profoundly resonant novel" T.L.S. Christensen is one of Scandinavia's finest and most celebrated storytellers, who has devoted the best part of his career to writing about the city of his birth. As Oslo slowly emerges from a period of crippling austerity, Echoes of the City shows how small, almost imperceptible acts of kindness and compassion, and tiny shifts in fortune, can change the lives of many. At the cent...
Set in post-war Oslo and following on from Echoes of a City, by an author who understands the city like no other. "One of Norway's finest writers" GUARDIAN "Profoundly resonant" TLS In Kirkeveien, Oslo, in the year 1956, forty-year-old Maj is worn down by being a homemaker and widowed mother. To the indignation of the Red Cross ladies, she cautiously frees herself from the role she has otherwise fulfilled to the letter. She finds a job that she turns out to be more than good at, and some kind of love, too. Her friend Margrethe is sick of her marriage to the antiquarian bookseller, Olaf Hall, but cannot think of divorce. Jesper gets a girlfriend who opens the door to a new, more liberated env...
Sometimes in the smallest of boys, there beats the biggest of hearts.Eleven-year-old Herman is a normal boy. He's just starting to notice girls and, in turn, be noticed by them. He is not that different from other boys, until the day he wakes up to discover that he's losing his hair... all of it. Presented with this dilemma, Herman uses his fertile imagination and a comical viewpoint on life to navigate his way through the rough seas commonly known as growing up. In the process, he manages to teache everyone he knows something about friendship, courage, acceptance - and love.
In stunning detail and elegant prose, this truly gripping, epic novel--a wonderful mixture of surreal comedy and touching intimacy--relates the lives of four generations of a far-from-ordinary family.
In this “enormously accomplished and compelling novel,” a man crisscrosses Scandinavia to solve the mystery of his wife’s death—and of his own life (Paul Auster, bestselling author of 4 3 2 1). Jonas Wergeland, a famous TV documentary producer with an almost magical knack for infidelity, returns one evening from the World’s Fair in Seville to find his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is a quest to find the killer, and an endlessly inventive look at the conditions that have brought Wergeland to this critical juncture in life. From his hairsbreadth escape from a ravenous polar bear while filming in Greenland to a near-death experience aboard a passenger ferry in the icy Baltic, the experiences that comprise the narrative of Wergeland’s life provide a fascinating portrait of a media icon at the crux of his journey as an artist.
When Ben Tomlin’s mother brings home his new “baby brother,” an eight-day-old chimpanzee, Ben is far from thrilled. His father, a renowned behavioral scientist, has uprooted the family and moved them halfway across the country, to Victoria, B.C., so he can pursue a high-profile experiment—to determine whether chimpanzees can learn human sign language. Zan must be raised exactly like a human. He’s dressed in clothes and fed in a high chair and has a room full of toys and books. Ben is soon smitten. Joining the team of students who are helping with the experiment, Ben becomes both researcher and adored older brother. Within months, Zan learns his first signs and becomes a media sensation. At his new school, Ben’s life seems similarly charmed as he vies for the attentions of the beautiful Jennifer—using his newly acquired scientific observational skills. But when Project Zan unexpectedly loses its funding, Ben’s father is under huge pressure to either make the experiment succeed or abandon it—and Zan. Unable to convince his father that Zan is now part of the family, Ben must risk everything to save his baby brother from an unimaginable fate.