The new novel in English from one of Norway’s most celebrated writers.

T Singer confronts indomitable loneliness in Solstad’s classic, heartbreaking yet darkly comic style.

‘A kind of surrealistic writer… Serious literature’ Haruki Murakami
‘Mad, sad and funny… Thrilling’ Geoff Dyer

Singer, a thirty-four-year-old recently trained librarian, arrives by train in the small town of Notodden to begin a new and anonymous life. He falls in love with Merete, a ceramicist, and moves in with her and her young daughter. After a few years together, the relationship starts to falter, and as the couple is on the verge of separating a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer’s life…


‘An utterly hypnotic writer’ James Wood
‘Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence…’ Sunday Times

Winner of the Norwegian Critics Prize

Solstad’s construction of reality is uniquely his own… mad, sad and funny… the behavioural possibilities of the novel are subtly and fundamentally enlarged. -- Geoff Dyer * Observer *
All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist. -- Charles Finch * New York Times *
Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence… Solstad exposes us to ourselves. -- David Mills * Sunday Times *
He’s a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that’s serious literature. -- Haruki Murakami
His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance. -- Karl Ove Knausgaard
He doesn’t write to please other people... Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea… the drama exists in his voice, in his comments and views, and that works, it helps connect the reader to the story. -- Lydia Davis
Solstad's novels are full of dryly comic, densely existential despair . . . reminiscent of Witold Gombrowicz, with his keen sense of the absurd. Both translators Tiina Nunnally and Steven T. Murray have rendered Solstad's rhythms into wonderfully idiosyncratic English. -- Nathan Kapp * Times Literary Supplement *
[Solstad] is a wonderful stylist whose prose gives the impression of not being stylised at all… The prose is distracted and persistent, compelling and compelled. -- Frank Lawton * Literary Review *
Before Knausgaard, Norway had Solstad, whose pitiless, mesmeric, darkly comic stories of quiet desperation – here it’s a failed librarian – turn banality to sublimity. * The Arts Desk *
An idiosyncratic, at times impish writer, whose voice – insinuating yet direct, droll but aghast – is impossible to ‘unhear’ once you’ve encountered it. * The White Review *

Dag Solstad is one of Norway’s leading and most celebrated contemporary writers. Solstad has won many Norwegian and international awards, most recently the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize in 2017, and is the only author to have won the Norwegian Critics Prize three times. All three of his novels already published in English – Shyness and Dignity, Novel 11, Book 18 and Professor Andersen's Night – have been listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.