by Jon Fosse
Part of Vaim
First published 2025
Jatgeir lives alone in Vaim, a small fishing village on the Norwegian coast. One day he takes a boat to the city for something ordinary: a needle and thread. He is cheated twice and comes back empty-handed. He ties up, lies down in the hull, and lets the rocking water pull him toward sleep. Then someone calls his name from the quay. He opens his eyes. A woman stands there in the dark, suitcase at her feet. Her name is Eline. She was the love he kept to himself when he was young, the one he never spoke about out loud. He loved her so completely that he gave her name to his boat. Now she is standing at the edge of the dock asking to come aboard. What happens next spreads across three narrators and ends in three deaths. The story moves through the hours where the boundary between the living and whatever else is out there grows thin. Jon Fosse, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, opens a new trilogy with this book. He follows the small, almost invisible moments that quietly determine everything, including the shape of a life at its end.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, contemporary, magical-realism, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, haunting, introspective, lyrical, meditative, melancholic
Tropes: ghost-encounter, multiple-perspectives, second-chance-romance, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Vaim, Norway
Period: 21st-century
120 pages · Hardcover · Transit Books
Content warnings: death