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Love

By: Hanne Orstavik, Martin Aitken
Narrated by: Assal Ghawami, Martin Aitken
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Publisher's summary

Winner of the 2019 Pen Translation Prize

Finalist for The National Book Award for Translated Literature

A mother and son move to a village in northern Norway, each ensconced in their own world. Their distance has fatal consequences.

Love is the story of Vibeke and Jon, a mother and son who have just moved to a small place in the north of Norway. It's the day before Jon's birthday, and a travelling carnival has come to the village. Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club, and Vibeke is going to the library. From here on, we follow the two individuals on their separate journeys through a cold winter's night - while a sense of uneasiness grows.

Love illustrates how language builds its own reality, and thus how mother and son can live in completely separate worlds. This distance is found not only between human beings, but also within each individual. This novel shows how such distance may have fatal consequences.

©2018 Hanne Orstavik, Martin Aitken (P)2018 Random House Audio
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Critic reviews

"A trim and electrifying novel... Ørstavik's mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality of sensationalism from trailing this story of a woman and her accidentally untended child. Both of them long for love, but the desire lines of the book are beautifully crooked. Jon wants his mother, and to be let in out of the cold...the cold that seems a character throughout this excellent novel of near misses." (Claire Vaye Watkins, The New York Times Book Review)

"Love is Ørstavik's strongest book." (Karl Ove Knausgaard)

"Prizewinning Norwegian Ørstavik follows the parallel courses of a single mother and her 8-year-old son during a night that moves unrelentingly toward tragedy.... A nightmarish sense of impending doom hangs over these carefully detailed, tightly controlled pages...icy cold to the core." (Kirkus Reviews)

"[A] haunting masterpiece.... The deceptively simple novel is slow-burning, placing each character into situations associated with horror - entering an unfamiliar house, accepting a ride from a stranger - and the result is a magnificent tale." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Shortlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, shortlisted for the 2019 PEN America Translation Prize

What listeners say about Love

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like dry snow that doesn't hold together .

so glad this was a short book, couldn't wait to be done. I get the focus on daily routine and important to understand characters but no plot development, just hints.

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