A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middleaged artist and her aging mother, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controverdsial modern classic, Will and Testament'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art.The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought aboiut a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonius absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.

"A brilliant study of the mundane, full of unexpected detours and driving prose. Hjorth's novel ingeniously orbits the intimate stories that are possible only when a character has put words on paper and sent them through the post." – New York Times Book Review, "The Best Post Office Novel You Will Read Before the Election""Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers." – Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?From the author of the 2019 National Book Award Longlisted Will and TestamentEllinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal...

A passionate and groundbreaking bestseller from one of Norway’s most highly-regarded and award-winning novelists, for readers of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion and Coco Mellors' Cleopatra and FrankensteinA relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a...

A controversial bestseller from one of Norway's most intelligent and highly-regarded novelistsWhen a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favoritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different – a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured. Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman's struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth's novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.

Original title: Et norsk hus © Cappelen Damm AS, 2014. Published in agreement with Cappelen Damm.This translation © Charlotte Barslund 2017.The translator’s moral right to be identified as the translator of the work has been asserted.Norvik Press Series B: English Translations of Scandinavian Literature, no. 72A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.ISBN: 978-1-909408-40-1Norvik PressDepartment of Scandinavian StudiesUniversity College LondonGower StreetLondon WC1E 6BTUnited KingdomWebsite: www.norvikpress.comE-mail address: norvik.press@ucl.ac.ukManaging editors: Elettra Carbone, Sarah Death, Janet Garton, C. Claire Thomson.Layout and cover design: Essi ViitanenCover image: Hesteblomster, Frida Hansen, 1900, detail. Photo: Jensen, Stina Aadland  / Stiftelsen KulturkvartaletPrinted in the UK by Lightning Source UK LtdThis translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s “PEN Translates!” programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly cooperation of writers and the free exchange of ideas.  www.englishpen.org