Showing results by author "Martin Aitken - translator" in All Categories

In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.

My Struggle introduces American listeners to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intense and irresistible to hear. Unafraid of the big issues - death, love, art, fear - and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.

Celebrated throughout the world for her candor and sensitivity to the rhythms of language, Hanne Ørstavik is a leading light on the international stage. Ørstavik's prose adheres so closely to the inner workings of its narrator's mind as to nearly undo itself. In Martin Aitken's translation, Ørstavik's piercing story sings. Ti Amo brings a new, deeply personal approach, as the novel is based in Ørstavik's own experience of losing her husband to cancer. By facing loss directly, she includes listeners in an experience that many face in isolation.

In their remote Viking settlement, Folkví and her brother, Áslakr, have always been close—unnaturally close. They’ve grown more intimate still as Folkví learns her shaman mother’s craft, as men regard her with newly devouring eyes. Then illness carries off their parents, and the nest of home is shattered. Áslakr sets off on his first expedition, abandoning Folkví to the dark of an endless winter. When he returns, he’s done the unthinkable: He’s found someone else to love.

Told from the perspective of precocious 14-year-old Peter, The Elephant Keepers’ Children is about three siblings and how they deal with life alongside their eccentric parents. Peter’s father is a vicar, his mother an artisan, and both are equally and profoundly devout. The family lives on the fictional island of Finø, where people of all faiths coexist peacefully. Yet nothing is at it seems. When Peter’s parents suddenly go missing, Peter and his siblings fear the worst - has their parents’ relentless quest to boost church attendance finally put them in danger?

Liv, an intense and reticent theologian, moves to a bitterly cold fishing village to take up a post as the church's new pastor following the death of her friend, Kristiane. In the upper rooms of a large house overlooking the fjord, Liv plans her sermons and studies the violent interplay of Norway's Christian colonial past.

"I'm not inarticulate, but I leave language to the room around me," says Fine Gråbøl's nameless narrator as she dreams of furniture flickering to life in the room she occupies at a temporary psychiatric care unit for young adults. Our narrator is obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness, assuming personalities and private motives. She also cannot sleep and practices her daily routines with the urgency of survival—peeling a carrot, drinking prune juice—all an acutely calibrated exploration into having a home.