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"An ingenious pocket universe." —Caitlin Horrocks, The New York Times Book Review "Gunnhild Øyehaug is a magician of the highest rank."—Catherine Lacey On an ordinary day in Bergen, Norway, in the late 1990s, Anna is reading in the garden while her two-year-old daughter, Laura, plays on her tricycle. Then, in one startling moment, Anna misreads a word, an alternate universe opens up, and Laura disappears. Twenty years or so later, life has gone on as if nothing happened, but in each of the women's lives, something is not quite right. Both Anna and Laura continue to exist, but they are invisible to each other and forgotten in each other's worlds. Both are writers and amateur pianists. They are married; Anna had two more children after Laura disappeared, and Laura is expecting a child of her own. They worry about their families, their jobs, the climate—and whether this reality is all there is.
Gunnhild Øyehaug
Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, followed in 2018 by Wait, Blink, which was adapted into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men's Shirts, and in 2022 by Present Tense Machine. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.
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Kari Dickson
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Kari Dickson grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland, but spent most of her summers in Norway with grandparents who couldn’t speak English, so spoke Norwegian from an early age. She went on to Scandinavian Studies at UCL. While working in theatre in London, she was asked to do literal translations of two Ibsen plays, which fuelled her interest in Norwegian literature and led to an MA in Translation at the University of Surrey. Having worked initially as a commercial translator, including some years at the central bank of Norway, she now concentrates solely on literature. Her portfolio includes literary fiction, crime, non-fiction, and plays. Her translation of Roslund & Hellström’s Three Seconds won the CWA International Dagger in 2011. Kari currently teaches Norwegian language, literature and translation in the Scandinavian Studies department at the University of Edinburgh.
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