Norway

Joanna Kavenna is very serious about games. Her novels have a certain playful quality, even her debut Inglorious, where the humour and allusions are Mittel-european. More markedly ludic are her Lewis Carroll-esque fantasy about quantum physics, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and the Philip K. Dickish tech-dystopia of Zed. In Seven, however, it’s not just the style but the subject. As if to make clear that games are neither childish nor mere distractions, there is a pointed reference to Johan Huizinga’s study Homo Ludens¸ published on the eve of the second world war. The narrator here is working for a formidable philosopher in Oslo, whose current project is entitled

With Christmas only just gone, I hope it’s not too late to recommend Ingvild Rishoi’s bittersweet seasonal novella – a bestseller in Norway which now comes into English in Caroline Waight’s crisp and fluent prose. Here’s a child’s-eye story about adult griefs and troubles which uses dramatic irony to consistent effect; a skinny little narrative halfway to being a fable which nevertheless keeps its roots in reality, with mobile phones, Frosties, casual swearing, the workings of child protection services and the logistics and microeconomics of the Christmas tree business. The narrator, ten-year-old Ronja, and her teenage sister Melissa are growing up in Oslo with their alcoholic single dad. Things are

I finished reading the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest series – no longer a trilogy, perhaps a sextet – in three days. The Third Realm is as unsettling, disturbing and riveting as the previous instalments, and I was even disappointed that it came in at a mere 500 pages – considerably shorter than the others. But all three books are less dense than those in his celebrated My Struggle series. There is a lot of dialogue, and Knausgaard’s skill in capturing conversation makes his characters spring vividly from the page. Ordinary failings, such as insecurity, jealousy, duplicity, lust and irritation, are subtly conveyed through a surly comment, a

When, last summer, a group of Orcadians declared they’d like to leave the UK and join Norway, it became clear just how little most of us in the south understand Orkney. Friends who know I go there often ask me where it is (somewhere near the Hebrides?), how many Orkney islands there are, and whether they are mountainous or flat. As Peter Marshall explains at the start of this astonishing tour de force, the 70-odd Orkney islands lie just 25 miles north of Scotland, separated from the mainland by the Pentland Firth – the point, he says, at which ‘the North Sea meets the Atlantic, a place of hidden, treacherous

The Nobel Prize for Literature this year was awarded to the Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse (pictured). He has long been admired by anyone in the literary world keen to advertise their seriousness. The Canadian critic Randy Boyagoda, writing of Fosse’s Septology in the New York Times, said that he’d ‘come into awe and reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense metaphysical fortitude’. The technique is to bury statements of mystic vision or horror in piles of mostly tiny and uninteresting events Fosse is published in Britain by Fitzcarraldo Editions, that elegant firm bringing all sorts of high-minded writers to our attention in matchy-matchy formats. The Spectator’s literary editor

The Wolves of Eternity is the second volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s trilogy which began with The Morning Star, but is that book’s prequel. The Morning Star examined events in the lives of various narrators at the time of the appearance of a bright new celestial body, bringing uncharacteristic heat and luminosity to Norway. It read like a shiver-inducing drama penned by a combination of Phil Redmond, Irvine Welsh and Stephen King. Part of its genius lay in fleshing out the characters by expressing the ugly thoughts we all keep repressed: irritation with over-familiar strangers; frustration with lovers; the thunderbolt of lust; and boundaries and the ways they are breached.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding obsessions of our times — identity, gender, the meaning of truth — play out through six maddeningly detailed, curiously compelling autofictions. It’s the kind of work that casts a long shadow; any fiction that follows, the author knows, is in communion, and competition, with that momentous work. Which is why The Morning Star, Knausgaard’s return to the novel after an almost decade-long break, is both fascinating and frustrating. With its biblical allusion title and occult MacGuffin (a new star has mysteriously appeared in the night sky over Norway), the book