prize-winning novel by one of the foremost writers of her generation, explores the horror and beauty of being sixteen-years-old.

Autorentext

VIGDIS HJORTH is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and best-selling novels. Will and Testament was nominated for the National Book Award, Long Live the Post Horn! won the Believer Book Award for fiction in 2020, and Is Mother Dead was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.

CHARLOTTE BARSLUND translates books and plays from Norway, Denmark and Greenland. She has translated five of Vigdis Hjorth’s novels, including Will and Testament and Is Mother Dead.

Klappentext

As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.

It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended.

In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores through fiction the parts of childhood that chime through the decades.