Stay with Me

Synopsis

The narrator of this novel is a Norwegian writer living in Milan. A year has passed since the premature death of her Italian husband. She falls in love. M is seventeen years younger than her, but the connection between them is intense and of a kind she has never felt before. Then, as his vulnerability starts showing, so does his troubling rage. She knows this rage. It was always present in her childhood, and it created an all-encompassing fear in her.

In Stay with Me, Hanne Ørstavik returns to her theme of love, this time exploring how it can be intertwined with insecurity, fear and violence. How do you recognise love, if fear is the feeling you know?

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.