Book description
Audun is the only one of his family who remains with his mother in
working-class Oslo. He delivers newspapers when he is not in school
and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with his
best friend - but there are some things Audun won't talk about.
Stories about his family, the weeks he spent living in a couple of
cardboard boxes, and the day of his little brother's birth, when his
drunken father fired three shots into the ceiling.
A beautiful and disquieting coming-of-age story from the winner of
the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International IMPAC
Dublin Literary Award.
Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several
years as an unskilled labourer, a bookseller, a writer and a
translator until he made his literary debut in 1987 with the short
story collection Ashes in my Mouth, Sand in my Shoes, which was
widely acclaimed by critics. He made his literary breakthrough in 2003
with the prizewinning novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been
translated into forty-nine languages so far and won many prizes. His
second novel To Siberia was published to critical acclaim in 2008.
Don Bartlett lives in Norfolk and works as a freelance translator of
Scandinavian literature. He has translated, or co-translated,
Norwegian novels by Lars Saabye Christensen, Roy Jacobson, Ingvar
Ambjørnsen, Kjell Ola Dahl, Gunnar Staalesen, Pernille Rygg and Jo Nesbo.
