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

Petterson's spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force * The New Yorker *
Petterson is a profoundly gifted novelist -- Richard Ford
Is there a living writer better at conveying the disconcerting relationship between time and memory?... There is pleasure, too, in watching Petterson shift through the gears from pleasure to unease in one of those gloriously sinuous sentences that have become something of a trademark -- Adrian Turpin * Financial Times *
Petterson is remarkably gifted -- James Wood
Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting-all shafts of light and clear palpable chill * Time *
Subtly incisive . . . Clean sentence after clean sentence, Petterson conveys both the melancholy and the demi-pleasurable sensation of being fundamentally untethered. * The New York Times Book Review *
Readers will find that they're in the hands of a master whose quiet, unforgettable voice leaves you yearning to hear more. * The Boston Globe *
Per Petterson stands unsurpassed among contemporary writers for existential truth-telling. * Financial Times *
A rare insight into male vulnerability -- Jessie Thompson * Evening Standard *

Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled labourer and a bookseller. He has received the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize and, on multiple occasions, the Brage Prize, the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Booksellers' Best Book of the Year Award for his many celebrated novels, such as In the Wake, I Curse the River of Time and I Refuse. Petterson made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with Out Stealing Horses, which in English translation won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It has been published in fifty languages and was an international bestseller.