If Only
Translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund.
- £12.99
- Available
- Paperback published on 03/09/2024
- Page count: 352 pages
- ISBN: 9781839768880
Quick take
A passionate and groundbreaking bestseller from one of Norway’s most highly-regarded and award-winning novelists, for readers of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion and Coco Mellors' Cleopatra and Frankenstein.
Synopsis
A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death. So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.
About the author
Vigdis Hjorth is a Norwegian novelist. She was long listed for the National Book Award in 2021.
This book can be found in:
More books published by Verso Book
Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year.
More books by Vigdis Hjorth
More books written or translated by Charlotte Barslund
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