Per Petterson

Sixty-seven-year-old Trond Sander lives secluded in a far corner of Norway. Casting his mind back to 1948, he recalls a horse stealing prank with his best friend that turned tragic and changed his life forever.

Per Petterson won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his masterful novel Out Stealing Horses, hailed as a best book of the year by the New York Times. In I Curse the River of Time, he takes listeners to 1989, when Communism was crumbling all over Europe. Struggling through his divorce, an overwhelmed Arvid Jansen leaves Norway to reconnect with his Danish mother, who has terminal cancer. Arriving in Denmark, Arvid is flooded with memories-of his...

On his first day of school, a teacher welcomes Audun to the class by asking him to describe his former life in the country. But there are stories about his family he would prefer to keep to himself, such as the weeks he spent living in a couple of cardboard boxes, and the day of his little brother's birth, when his drunken father fired three shots into the ceiling. So he refuses to talk and refuses to take off his sunglasses. In his late teens Audun...

Unable to process the grief of losing his parents and brothers in a tragic ferry accident, Arvid Jansen, now divorced and living dangerously, is forced to come to terms with the fact that someone still needs him when his daughter reaches out to him for help.

"Echoland is the powerful and emotionally resonant first novel from Per Petterson. Written in the mold of his early story collection Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, it features a young Arvid Jansen, who is now twelve, on the verge of his teenage years and beginning to understand more about the world and his place in it. Set over the course of a single formative summer, the novel captures a series of episodes from Arvid's long visit to his grandparents'...