Description

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 DegreesC, 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.

Can passion be mistaken for love? When Ida meets Arnold, also married, at a conference, she impulsively invites him to share her bed. She returns home, already half-obsessed, and the dissolution of her marriage and break-up of her family pass almost without her noticing. Arnold has a more relaxed attitude toward the affair. But neither his coolness nor the alarming talk she hears about him can dampen her desire. When she finally has Arnold for herself, all the surface niceties and indulgences they enjoy – travel, sex, beers for breakfast and cocktails for dinner – can’t sustain the sweetness of the fantasy. Their mounting jealousies and insecurities metastasize, resulting in violence and addiction.

In urgent prose, with layers of candid and vivid detail, Hjorth shows just how devastating love can be when it binds the wrong people.

Publisher Review

An absorbing study of inner turmoil … gripping * Guardian * Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers. * Sheila Heti * A love affair consumes a Norwegian woman’s life in Hjorth’s breathtaking latest … Hjorth’s narration is both irresistible and exhausting, a headlong rush that describes and enacts Ida’s feelings as she careens between love and hate for a man she knows isn’t “worth the sacrifice.” Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ida has occasional flashes that she’s acting irrationally, and Hjorth evokes the agony of her protagonist’s self-entrapment to a devastating degree. It’s an enthralling tale of passion gone to rot. — starred review * Publishers Weekly * Hjorth emerges once again, in this novel, as not only a chronicler of the bruised and bloody, but their champion, an author who grants her characters the power to author their own stories themselves. — Griffin Reed * Full Stop * Hjorth, the Norwegian novelist behind 2022’s Is Mother Dead, painstakingly chronicles a 30-year-old married woman’s all-consuming and volatile romance with a married man, which blurs the lines between passion and love. — Sophia Stewart * The Millions * The Norwegian author of Long Live the Post Horn! and Will and Testament has formed a small but formidable cult following in the US, and If Only should only grow their army. If Only starts off with enigmatic and addictive words of love and death that call to mind our favorite doomed affairs-painful and poetic, cursed and necessary, we must go back in time to understand how our heroine found herself on the brink, caught between passion and ruin. — James Folta * Lit Hub; Most Anticipated Books of 2024 * Feverish and intoxicating, If Only is a novel about the depths of a life-altering devotion and the connections between love, creativity, and self-making. * Foreword Reviews * Who are we without passionate love, and do we need heartbreak to truly know ourselves? If Only chronicles one woman’s questions of life, love and existence during a torrid love affair. — B&N Reads Everything here that sets my teeth on edge – the claustrophobia and repetition, the endless torture the lovers put each other through – is exactly what makes Hjorth’s novel so remarkably, and horrifyingly, accomplished. — Lucy Scholes * Telegraph *