In The Wake

In The Wake

Summary

Early one morning Arvid finds himself standing outside the bookshop where he used to work, drunk, dirty, with two fractured ribs, and no idea how he came to be there. He does not even recognise his face in the mirror. It is as if he has dropped out of the flow of life.

Slowly, uncontrollably, the memories return to him, and Arvid struggles under the weight of the tragedy which has blighted his life - the death of his parents and younger siblings in an accident six years previously.

At times almost unbearably moving, In the Wake is nonetheless suffused with unexpected blessings: humour, wisdom, human compassion, and a sense of the perpetual beauty of the natural world.

By the winner of both the IMPAC Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Reviews

  • Outstanding... Almost every paragraph of his poet's prose is informed by an awareness of the precariousness of life
    Times Literary Supplement

About the author

Per Petterson

Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled labourer and a bookseller. He has received the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize and, on multiple occasions, the Brage Prize, the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Booksellers' Best Book of the Year Award for his many celebrated novels, such as In the Wake, I Curse the River of Time and I Refuse. Petterson made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with Out Stealing Horses, which in English translation won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It has been published in fifty languages and was an international bestseller.
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