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Men in My Situation

A tender, merciless portrait of a grief, divorce, fatherhood and a life going to pieces. A major new novel from the author of bestselling Out Stealing Horses.

Men in My Situation charts the existence of 38-year-old author Arvid Jansen in the wake of his divorce, his sense of abandonment exacerbated by the loss of his mother, father and two brothers to a fire onboard a ferry the previous year.

Arvid's life has become a question of holding on to a few firm things. He revisits old battlefields around town, gets drunk, meets women and goes home with them, or he drives around in his Mazda, where he also spends the night when his bed becomes an impossible place to be. A year has passed since Turid took their three daughters and left. Early one morning she calls him from the closed railway station Bjørkelangen. Arvid picks her up and drives her to her new home in Skjetten. But for once, he refuses to give her what she asks. In the terrace house, there is no trace of their life together. He has been completely wiped out.

Arvid feels that Vigdis, his oldest daughter, sees what kind of man he really is: adrift and inept, paralysed by grief. And perhaps she's right to keep her distance from his lonely life. But at the same time she might be the one who needs him the most.

In a classic, ‘pettersonian’ manner, the story moves back and forth in time, and it soon becomes clear that Arvid is a man who lost his way a long time ago, and who has by now also lost or been left by all those dear to him. But a question is implicitly posed in the first chapter — can there be redemption for a man in his situation?

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 288
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 978-1-5291-1152-1
  • EAN
  • 9781529111521
  • Release date
  • 2022