The Lake of the Dead


André Bjerke - 1942
    Ever since, it is said, anyone who stays at the cabin is possessed by Gruvik's spirit and driven to drown themselves in the lake. What's more, Gruvik's restless ghost has been seen by many of the local people, prowling the woods by moonlight.Bjørn Werner, a young writer from Oslo, ignored the old superstitions and rented Dead Man's Cabin as a quiet spot to finish his book. Now he has disappeared, and the evidence suggests he threw himself in the lake in a fit of madness. The police write it off as a suicide, but his friends are not so sure. Kai Bugge, Bjørn's psychiatrist, believes in the suicide explanation, while private detective Harald Gran thinks it's a case of murder, and Gabriel Mørk, an expert in the occult, is certain that darker and otherworldly forces are at play. They travel to unravel the mystery of their friend's terrible fate, but not all of them will return alive from their stay at the Lake of the Dead ...André Bjerke's The Lake of the Dead (1942) was voted the all-time best Norwegian crime novel, and its atmospheric 1958 film adaptation is regarded as one of Norway's best films. This new translation is the first-ever American publication of Bjerke's classic, which features an unusual mixture of murder mystery and supernatural horror that will keep readers guessing until the thrilling conclusion.

Dina's Book


Herbjørg Wassmo - 1989
    Beautiful, eccentric, and tempestuous, Dina carries a terrible burden: at the age of five she accidentally causes her mother's death. Blamed by her father and banished to a farm, she grows up untamed and untaught. Nobody leads the child through her grief, and the accident remains a gruesome riddle of death. Her guilt becomes her obsession: her unforgiving mother haunts her every day.After several years of exile, and at the insistence of the local pastor, her father takes Dina back. By now she has become like a wolf cub. Her father has remarried, to a younger woman whom she detests, and a strict discipline begins. A tutor is brought in; coarse language is replaced by polite conversation, climbing to the top of the trees by music. But the efforts have little effect. Private and closely guarded, Dina nonetheless is able to manipulate those around her, while her unconventional behavior and erotic power both enchant and ensnare.At sixteen Dina is married off to wealthy fifty-year-old landowner Jacob, a friend of her father who has fallen completely under her spell. Jacob dies under mysterious circumstances, and Dina becomes mute. When finally she emerges from her trauma, she runs Jacob's estate with an iron hand. But still Dina wrestles with her two unappeased ghosts: Jacob and her mother. Until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer Leo, enters her life and changes it forever.

Love


Hanne Ørstavik - 1997
    Their distance has fatal consequences.Love is the story of Vibeke and Jon, a mother and son who have just moved to a small place in the north of Norway. It's the day before Jon's birthday, and a travelling carnival has come to the village. Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club, and Vibeke is going to the library. From here on we follow the two individuals on their separate journeys through a cold winter's night - while a sense of uneasiness grows. Love illustrates how language builds its own reality, and thus how mother and son can live in completely separate worlds. This distance is found not only between human beings, but also within each individual. This novel shows how such distance may have fatal consequences.

Amtmannens døtre


Camilla Collett - 1854
    ""A historical milestone in the development of Norwegian feminism, the novel was also a significant influence on major authors such as Ibsen, who admired Collett's insights into the crippling options of women in their time - A stimulating, thought provoking work, excellently translated."" - Belles Lettres. ""A classic in Norwegian literature."" - News of Norway.

The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground


Ludvig Holberg - 1741
    Niels Klim discovers worlds within our own—exotic civilizations and fabulous creatures scattered across the underside of the earth's crust and, at the earth's center, a small, inhabited planet orbiting around a miniature sun. In an epic journey, Klim visits countries led by sentient and contemplative trees, a kingdom of intelligent apes preoccupied with fashion and change, a land whose inhabitants don’t speak out of their mouths, neighboring countries of birds locked in an eternal war, and a land where string basses talk musically to one another. Brave, inquisitive, and greedy, Klim faces many challenges, the greatest of which are his own temptations. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground is a classic in speculative fiction and was the first fully realized novel set underground in a hollow earth. First published in 1741, it has earned comparisons to Jonathan Swift’s contemporaneous fantasy, Gulliver’s Travels.

Shyness and Dignity


Dag Solstad - 1994
    He asked them to take out their school edition of The Wild Duck. He was once more struck by their hostile attitude toward him. But it couldn't be helped, he had a task to perform and was going through with it. It was from them as a group that he sensed that massive dislike sent forth by their bodies. Individually they could be very pleasant, but together, positioned like now, at their desks, they constituted a structural enmity, directed at him and all that he stood for. Elias Rukla begins yet another day under the leaden Oslo sky. At the high school where he teaches, a novel insight into Ibsen's The Wild Duck grips him with a passion so intense that he barely notices the disinterest of his students. After the lesson, when a broken umbrella provokes an unpredictable rage, he barely notices the students' intense curiosity. He soon realizes, however, that this day will be the decisive day of his life.With Shyness and Dignity, Dag Solstad - praised in Norway as one of the most innovative novelists of his generation - offers an intricate and richly drawn portrait of a man who feels irrevocably alienated from contemporary culture, politics, and, ultimately, humanity.

The Last of the Vikings


Johan Bojer - 1921
    Its action centers upon a single fishing season, when the Norwegian peasantry, descendants of the Vikings, make their annual voyage to the islands.

The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am


Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold - 2009
    After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now. Afraid that her life will be over before anyone knows that she lived, Mathea digs out her old wedding dress, bakes some sweet cakes, and heads out into the world—to make her mark. She buries a time capsule out in the yard. (It gets dug up to make room for a flagpole.) She wears her late husband’s watch and hopes people will ask her for the time. (They never do.) Is it really possible for a woman to disappear so completely that the world won’t notice her passing? The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a macabre twist on the notion that life “must be lived to the fullest.”

Child Wonder


Roy Jacobsen - 2009
    Life is a struggle to make ends meet, but he does not mind. When his mother decides to take a lodger to help pay the bills, he watches with interest as she freshens up their small apartment with new wallpaper and a sofa paid for in installments. He befriends their new male lodger, whose television is more tempting to him than his mother would like.When a half sister whom he never knew joins the household, Finn takes her under his wing over an everlasting summer on Håøya Island. But he can't understand why everyone thinks his new sister is so different from every other child. Nor can he fathom his mother's painful secret, one that pushes them ever farther apart. As summer comes to a close, Finn must attempt to grasp the incomprehensible adult world and his place within it.Child Wonder is a powerful and unsentimental portrait of childhood. Roy Jacobsen, through the eyes of a child, has produced an immensely uplifting novel that shines with light and warmth.

Unquiet


Linn Ullmann - 2015
    A heartbreaking and darkly funny portrait of the intricacies of family life, Unquiet is a stunning, genre- bending meditation on time, memory, and language, on growing up and growing old.

Maya


Jostein Gaarder - 1999
    Why does Ana bear such a close resemblance to the model for Goya's famous Maja paintings? What is the significance of the Joker as he steps out of his pack of cards? As the action moves from Fiji to Spain, from the present to the past, unfolding further stories within the stories, the novel reveals an astonishing richness and complexity. As bold and imaginative in its sweep as Sophie's World, it shows again that Jostein Gaarder's unique and special gift is to make us wonder at the awe-inspiring mystery of the universe.

Replacement


Tor Ulven - 1993
    These people reminisce, dream, reflect, observe, and talk to themselves; each stuck in their respective traps, each fantasizing about how their lives might have turned out differently. A masterpiece of compression and confession, Replacement dramatizes the tension between the concrete realities we think we cannot alter, and our interior lives, where we feel anything might still be possible.

Beyond Sing the Woods


Trygve Gulbranssen - 1933
    For the 2005 Norwegian edition, see: ISBN13: 9788203189081.The story of three generations of an old-lineage Norwegian family making their life in the northern woods (circa 1750's.) Main themes are the struggle between tradition and innovation, the prejudices of pastoral society, and a study in human nature and man's ability to make peace with it.

What Maisie Knew


Henry James - 1897
    And when both take lovers and remarry, Maisie-solitary, observant and wise beyond her years- is drawn into an entangled adult world of intrigue and sexual betrayal, until she is finally compelled to choose her own future. Published in 1897 when Henry James was becoming increasingly experimental with narrative technique and fascinated by the idea of the child's-eye view, What Maisie Knew is a subtle, intricate yet devastating portrayal of an innocent adrift in a corrupt society.

Adam Bede


George Eliot - 1859
    However much the reader may sympathize with Hetty Sorrel and identify with Arthur Donnithorne, her seducer, and with Adam Bede, the man Hetty betrays,it is George Eliots's creation of the distant aesthetic whole - the complex, multifarious life of Hayslope - which so grips the reader's imagination. As Stephen Gill comments: 'Reading the novel is a process of learning simultaneously about the world of Adam Bede and the world of Adam Bede.'