Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, Charlotte Barslund (Translator)

One of the foremost writers of her generation explores the strength and pain of being young

As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.

It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended.

In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores through fiction the parts of childhood that chime through the decades.