Description

A major new novel from the author of the international bestseller Out Stealing Horses. Men in My Situation is a tender, scintillating portrait of grief, fatherhood and a life nearly going to pieces.

In 1992 Arvid Jansen is thirty-eight and divorced. Turid has left with their three girls, slipping into her young, exuberant crowd of friends – the colourful – and a new house with no trace of their previous life together. More than a year has passed since the tragic accident that took his parents and two of his brothers. Existence has become a question of holding on to a few firm things. Loud, smoky bars, whisky, records, company for the night and taxis home. Or driving his Mazda into the stunning, solitary landscape outside of Oslo, sleeping in the car when his bed is an impossible place to be, craving a connection that is always just beyond reach.

At some point, the girls decide against weekend visits with their dad. Arvid suspects that his eldest daughter, Vigdis, sees what kind of a man he really is. Adrift and inept, paralysed by grief. And maybe she’s right to keep her distance from his lonely life. Is there any redemption for a man in his situation? When Arvid has lost or been left by all those dear to him and feels his life unravelling, perhaps there is still a way forward.

Publisher Review

Petterson's spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force * The New Yorker * Petterson is a profoundly giften novelist -- Richard Ford Is there a living writer better at conveying the disconcerting relationship between time and memory?... There is pleasure, too, in watching Petterson shift through the gears from pleasure to unease in one of those gloriously sinuous sentences that have become something of a trademark -- Adrian Turpin * Financial Times * Petterson is remarkably gifted -- James Wood Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting-all shafts of light and clear palpable chill * Time *