Vaim by Jon Fosse, Damion Searls (Translator)

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature winner returns with a highly anticipated new work. Known for lyrical and deeply reflective writing, the author captures us again with a novel that unfolds in a Norwegian fishing village. The first in an upcoming trilogy is a journey beneath the surface of human interaction and longing.

By Nobel Laureate in Literature Jon Fosse, Vaim begins a trilogy of novels set in a remote Norwegian fishing village. 

Jatgeir travels from the fishing village of Vaim to the city in search of a needle and thread. Cheated twice, he returns to his boat, where he falls asleep as waves rock the hull. Soon he is awakened by a voice: a woman is calling his name from the quay. There stands Eline, the secret love of his youth—and the namesake of his boat—with a packed suitcase. Eline pleads to come aboard. In what follows, this single encounter reverberates across three stories: three narrators, three deaths.

The first new work from Jon Fosse since he was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, Vaim is a spectral novel that wanders and watches, imbued with things half-seen, perhaps not of this world yet still caught in its rhythms. The first in a trilogy of novels, it continues his investigation into the human condition: the subtle encounters that come to define our lives and our deaths, and what lies in the threshold between what is and what is longed for.