Men in My Situation

Men in My Situation

By the author of the international bestseller Out Stealing Horses

Summary

A tender portrait of grief, fatherhood and a life going to pieces from the bestselling author.

'Vivid and moving... It would be hard to find a better writer than Petterson' Irish Times

In 1992 Arvid Jansen is thirty-eight, divorced and paralysed by grief. More than a year has passed since the tragic accident that took his parents and two of his brothers.

Existence has become a question of holding on to a few firm things. Loud, smoky bars, whisky, records, company for the night and taxis home. Or driving his Mazda into the stunning, solitary landscape outside of Oslo, sleeping in the car when his bed is an impossible place to be.

Adrift and inept, Arvid feels his life unravelling. Is there any redemption for a man in his situation?

'Per Petterson writes about masculinity as well as anyone' Torrey Peters

'A rare insight into male vulnerability' Evening Standard

Reviews

  • Petterson's spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force
    The New Yorker

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more