Love

Synopsis

A short, suspenseful Norwegian winter’s tale crafted in beautifully spare and precise prose. A harrowing, tragic story of a mother and her son.

As clear and relentless as the cold air, Love unfolds over one winter’s evening. Single mother Vibeke and her son Jon have just moved to a small, remote town in the north of Norway. Tomorrow Jon will be nine. As Vibeke gets changed after work, Jon wonders what surprises his mother has prepared for him. He leaves the house certain she will make him a cake. But preoccupied with concerns of her own, she too ventures out. Inextricably linked yet desperately at odds, mother and son make their lonely ways through the unforgiving night.

Beautifully translated into English by Martin Aitken, this edition is the twenty-eighth international publication of Love. Hanne Ørstavik’s astonishing grasp of human fragility and her economy of form power this acknowledged masterpiece of Norwegian literature.

Author

With the publication of the novel Hakk (Cut) in 1994, Hanne Ørstavik (b. 1969) embarked on a career that would make her one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Love, which in 2006 was voted one of Norway’s Top Ten book of the last twenty-five years. Love was published to acclaim by And Other Stories in 2019. Upon the novel’s US publication, it won the PEN Translation Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Ørstavik has also won a number of prizes in Norway, including the prestigious Brage Prize. Ti Amo is her fifteenth novel.