Showing results by author "Martin Aitken-translator" in All Categories

My Struggle introduces American listeners to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intense and irresistible to hear. Unafraid of the big issues - death, love, art, fear - and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.

Liv, an intense and reticent theologian, moves to a bitterly cold fishing village to take up a post as the church's new pastor following the death of her friend, Kristiane. In the upper rooms of a large house overlooking the fjord, Liv plans her sermons and studies the violent interplay of Norway's Christian colonial past.

Told from the perspective of precocious 14-year-old Peter, The Elephant Keepers’ Children is about three siblings and how they deal with life alongside their eccentric parents. Peter’s father is a vicar, his mother an artisan, and both are equally and profoundly devout. The family lives on the fictional island of Finø, where people of all faiths coexist peacefully. Yet nothing is at it seems. When Peter’s parents suddenly go missing, Peter and his siblings fear the worst - has their parents’ relentless quest to boost church attendance finally put them in danger?

In their remote Viking settlement, Folkvi and her brother, Aslakr, have always been close—unnaturally close. They’ve grown more intimate still as Folkvi learns her shaman mother’s craft, as men regard her with newly devouring eyes. Then illness carries off their parents, and the nest of home is shattered. Áslakr sets off on his first expedition, abandoning Folkvi to the dark of an endless winter. When he returns, he’s done the unthinkable: He’s found someone else to love.

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew become strangely and deeply attached to them, and start aching for the same things - warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, and faraway Earth, which now only persists in memory - even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.