A major new novel from the author of the international bestseller Out Stealing Horses. Men in My Situation is a tender, scintillating portrait of grief, fatherhood and a life nearly going to pieces. In 1992 Arvid Jansen is thirty-eight and divorced. Turid has left with their three girls, slipping into her young, exuberant crowd of friends - the colourful - and a new house with no trace of their previous life together. More than a year has passed since the tragic accident that took his parents and two of his brothers. Existence has become a question of holding on to a few firm things. Loud, smoky bars, whisky, records, company for the night and taxis home. Or driving his Mazda into the stunning, solitary landscape outside of Oslo, sleeping in the car when his bed is an impossible place to be, craving a connection that is always just beyond reach. At some point, the girls decide against weekend visits with their dad. Arvid suspects that his eldest daughter, Vigdis, sees what kind of a man he really is. Adrift and inept, paralysed by grief. And maybe she's right to keep her distance from his lonely life. Is there any redemption for a man in his situation? When Arvid has lost or been left by all those dear to him and feels his life unravelling, perhaps there is still a way forward.

Discover a moving tale of isolation and the painful loss of innocence. **NOW AN INTERNATIONAL AWARD-WINNING FILM** In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events - the accidental death of a child, his best friend's feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father's decision to leave the family for another woman - will change his life forever. As a 67-year-old man, and following the death of his wife, Trond has moved to an isolated part of Norway to live in solitude. But a chance encounter with a character from the fateful summer of 1948 brings the painful memories of that year flooding back and will leave Trond even more convinced of his decision to end his days alone. 'One of Norway's finest living writers' Independent 'Deeply atmospheric...a stunning novel' Daily Telegraph

Petterson's debut novel, published in English for the first time Twelve-year-old Arvid and his family are on holiday, staying with his grandparents on the coast of Denmark. Dimly aware of the tension building between his mother and grandmother, Arvid is on the cusp of becoming a teenager: feeling awkward in his own skin, but adamant that he can take care of himself. As Arvid cycles down to the beach with its view of the lighthouse, he meets Mogens, an older boy who lives nearby, and together they set out to find fresh experiences in this strange new world. Echoland is a breathtaking read, capturing the unique drift of childhood summers, filled with unarticulated anxiety.

Painting and graphic prints are the preferred mediums of the Norwegian artist Hanne Borchgrevink (b.1951), who over the course time has focused her attention on the house as the leitmotif of her work. She reduces it to its elemental forms, which forever encounter new constellations. At the intersection of figuration and abstraction, of the verbal and non-verbal, the artist explores in her reduced language of forms color, surface and perception in a methodical and analytical way. Borchgrevink has long occupied a prominent position in the contemporary art of Norway, for in the repetition of her painterly and motivic vocabulary she always manages to find ever new and surprising as well as provocative answers.

Author of "Out Stealing Horses
"A "New York Times Book Review" Notable Book of the Year
Fans of Per Petterson's other books in English will be delighted by this opportunity to observe Arvid Jansen in his youth from a fresh perspective. In "It's Fine by Me," Arvid befriends a boy named Audun. On Audun's first day of school he refuses to talk or take off his sunglasses; there are stories he would prefer to keep to himself. Audun lives with his mother in a working-class district of Oslo, Norway. He delivers newspapers and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with Arvid. But he's not sure that school is the right path for him and feels that life holds other possibilities. Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, "It's Fine by Me" is a brilliant Scandinavian novel from the acclaimed author of "Out Stealing Horses" and "I Curse the River of Time."

Born into a troubled family in a Danish seaside town, the heroine of "To Siberia" clings to her brother, and he to her, with a desperate devotion. The novel tells the story of their powerful bond and their agonizing separation. Neglected by their parents, the two wander the streets of their village as young children, dreaming of a different life. The sister fantasizes about escaping to Siberia, but that dream seems ever more remote as her brother becomes a young man and disappears into the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation. Their separation begins years of wandering for her, and Petterson's novel traces the separate struggles of brother and sister with empathy, insight, and pathos.
With the same crystalline prose that made "Out Stealing Horses" a bestselling sensation, Per Petterson here draws a portrait of a sister and brother bound together powerfully by birth, and separated painfully by circumstance.

Per Petterson's masterful American debut novel is the story of a man whose life stands still after a terrible accident. Spanning an intense period of only a few weeks, "In the Wake" features 43 year-old Arvid, a writer who lost his parents and younger brothers in a ferry accident some years before. It is especially against his repressed memories--of his father and mother, and of his still-living brother--that Arvid must regard and define his own life. As Arvid struggles with memories, existential questions, and a deep sense of the world's injustice, he remains overwhelmed by grief, and guilt at having survived. Work on his novel stalls as he moves through life in a cold haze. But while Arvid's only human contact is with his Kurdish neighbor and with a woman whom he glimpses in a flat across the road, it is this routine contact that begins to slowly remind him of the world---of the beauty and humor we can find in the mundane. As he is reminded, his memories begin to return, and he begins to write again. Poignant, restrained, darkly funny, and at times unbearably moving, "In the Wake" takes on terrible tragedy as one man begins to reconnect with the natural world--at times our only source of solace when we've been left to survive in the wake.

A tender portrait of grief, fatherhood and a life going to pieces from the bestselling author. 'Vivid and moving... It would be hard to find a better writer than Petterson' Irish Times In 1992 Arvid Jansen is thirty-eight, divorced and paralysed by grief. More than a year has passed since the tragic accident that took his parents and two of his brothers. Existence has become a question of holding on to a few firm things. Loud, smoky bars, whisky, records, company for the night and taxis home. Or driving his Mazda into the stunning, solitary landscape outside of Oslo, sleeping in the car when his bed is an impossible place to be. Adrift and inept, Arvid feels his life unravelling. Is there any redemption for a man in his situation? 'Per Petterson writes about masculinity as well as anyone' Torrey Peters 'A rare insight into male vulnerability' Evening Standard

From the author of the international bestseller Out Stealing Horses I refuse to compromise. I refuse to forgive. I refuse to forget. Tommy's mother has gone. She walked out into the snow one night, leaving him and his sisters with their violent father. Without his best friend Jim, Tommy would be in trouble. But Jim has challenges of his own which will disrupt their precious friendship. A TLS and Guardian Book of the Year

""How impossible it was to grasp that in the end something as fine as this could be ground into dust" (p. 213). "
I Curse the River of Time, the new novel from the winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Out Stealing Horses, is a mesmerizingly beautiful book about love, regret, family secrets and failed revolution.
The novel takes us through thirty-seven-year-old Arvid's life and its descent towards a moment of terrible crisis. It traces his parents' hesitant support when he gives up his place at college to work in a paper mill, like his father; his experiences as a fervent young Maoist in Norway in the 1960s; the death of his younger brother; the passionate, enveloping romance that led to marriage and children and, for a time, happiness; the failure of that relationship, and its transformation into a source of harrowing pain.
By 1989, everything that gave Arvid's life meaning has melted into air. The collapse of the Berlin Wall mirrors the collapse of his marriage and his self-punishing alcoholism. When his mother is diagnosed with stomach cancer, Arvid sets off to their summer house in Denmark to be with her, meeting men and women from their past along the way. His despairing journey is also a quest for some kind of order in his life, perhaps even a new foundation. When Arvid finds his mother, and accompanies her in her illness, the novel turns to exploring the secrets that explain the distance between them - a distance that perhaps can never be crossed.
I Curse the River of Time" "describes the ways that the present and the past are always intertwined, and shows how the personal and political are one and the same. Written in a subdued and elegiac style, with flashes of devastating poetic beauty, it is an utterly absorbing experience, a book that displays wisdom of the kind that only profound loss can bring. Above all, it is a reminder of the power of great art to console us for life's burdens, an example of the way our dreams may brighten our bleakest moments.