Professor Andersen's Night

Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist

Per Petterson, author of Our Stealing Horses

Dag Solstad, Norway's most distinguished living writer, is a clear-eyed moralist who takes an existentialist's interest in the compromises, evasions and accommodations we make to get through life... Wryly humorous and needle-sharp in skewering pretension, Solstad is unlike anyone currently writing in English... A deeply rewarding novel

Sunday Times

[An] exquisitely composed novel... Dag Solstad is an unflinching explorer of the plight of educated humankind in the face of the inexplicable whose artistry matches his ambitious theme

Paul Binding, Independent

At times dark and moving, even, on occasion, unexpectedly funny, Professor Andersen's Night tackles a premise which would prove just as intriguing in a pacey thriller... It is visceral in its investigations into the derailing of one man's life in all its sticky, existential glory

Scotland on Sunday

This is a subversive little novel in which morality becomes a football. Whereas Novel 11, Book 18 pivots on a decision that defies everything, Professor Andersen's Night confronts morality, justice and compromise. Dag Solstad, who is frequently compared, with some justification, to Chekhov, has written a moral, almost allegorical novel in which he is far less interested in heroics than he is in humanity

Irish Times

A clever psychological inaction thriller, which uses the witnessing of a crime as the catalyst for a midlife crisis

Guardian

Four stars- fascinating

RTE guide

Solstad has an outstanding ability to portray mental processes accurately; here, the bleakness of Andersen's outlook is offset by the lightness of the prose, nimbly translated by Agnes Scott Langeland, and by the wry at humour at play in it

Times Literary Supplement

A penetrating combination of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Camus' existential ennui and Larkin's social embarrassment

Times Higher Education Supplement