Historical novel set in TUSCANY and LONDON
Ten great books set in NORWAY
17th March 2025
10 great books set in Norway. Scandi Noir is alive and well and living in Norway. The stark, often isolated Norwegian landscapes – fjords, mountains, and icy terrains – play a crucial role, creating a sense of isolation and vulnerability. The long, dark winters contribute to a pervasive feeling of unease. The cities seem sinister and crime ridden.
But there is a lot more to Norwegian literature than grisly crime. There are works of historical fiction and precarious living in Norway’s north, novels of everyday life and romance in Norway’s cities. It is a country that is rich in the diversity and quality of its writing.
Here are ten of our favourite titles:
The Bell in The Lake by Lars Mytting – BUTANGEN
Norway, 1880. In the secluded village of Butangen at the end of the valley, headstrong Astrid dreams of a life beyond marriage, hard work and children. And then Pastor Kai Schweigaard comes into her life, taking over the 700-year-old stave church with its carvings of pagan deities. The two church bells were forged by her forefather in the sixteenth century, in memory of conjoined sisters Halfrid and Gunhild Hekne, and are said to have supernatural powers. But now the pastor wants to tear it down, to replace it with a modern, larger church. Though Astrid is drawn to him, this may be a provocation too far.
Talented architecture student Gerhard Schönauer arrives from Dresden to oversee the removal of the church and its reconstruction in the German city. Everything about elegant Schönauer is so different, so cosmopolitan. Astrid must make a choice: for her homeland and the pastor, or for a daunting and uncertain future in Germany.
Then the bells begin to toll . . .
The Lazarus Solution by Kjell Ola Dahl – NORWAY, SWEDEN
Summer, 1943. Daniel Berkåk, who works as a courier for the Press and Military Office in Sweden, is killed on his last cross-border mission to Norway.
Demobbed sailor Kai Fredly escapes from occupied Norway into Sweden, but finds that the murder of his Nazi-sympathiser brother is drawing the attention of the authorities on both sides of the border.
The Norwegian government, currently exiled in London, wants to know what happened to their courier, and the job goes to writer Jomar Kraby, whose first suspect is a Norwegian refugee living in Sweden … a refugee with a past as horrifying as the events still to come … a refugee named Kai Fredly…
Both classic crime and a stunning exposé of Norwegian agents in Stockholm during the Second World War, The Lazarus Solution is a compulsive, complex and dazzling historical thriller from one of the genre’s finest writers.
The Looking-Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen – NORTHERN NORWAY
A tragic love story about two sisters who cannot live with or without each other. Far out on the plains of northern Norway stands a house. It belongs to two middle-aged sisters. They seldom venture out and nobody visits. The older needs nursing and the younger keeps house. Then, one day, a man arrives…——- Why Peirene chose to publish this book: ‘This is a tragedy about a woman who yearns for love but ends up in a painfully destructive conflict with her sister. It is also a story about loneliness – both geographical and psychological. Facing the prospect of a life without love, we fall back into isolating delusions at exactly the moment when we need to connect.
Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard – TROMØY
Childhood is exhilarating and terrifying. For the young Karl Ove, new houses, classes and friends are met with manic excitement and creeping dread. Adults occupy godlike positions of power, benevolent in the case of his doting mother, tyrannical in the case of his cruel father.
In the now infamously direct style of the My Struggle cycle, Knausgaard describes a time in which victories and defeats are felt keenly and every attempt at self-definition is frustrated. This is a book about family, memory and how we never become quite what we set out to be.
Echoes of the City by Lars Saabye Christensen – OSLO
Christensen is one of Scandinavia’s finest and most celebrated storytellers, who has devoted the best part of his career to writing about the city of his birth. As Oslo slowly emerges from a period of crippling austerity, Echoes of the City shows how small, almost imperceptible acts of kindness and compassion, and tiny shifts in fortune, can change the lives of many.
At the centre of the novel are Maj and Ewald Kristoffersen and their son Jesper, their lives closely entwined and overlapping with their neighbours’ on Kirkeveien. When the butcher’s son Jostein is knocked down in a traffic accident and loses his hearing, Jesper promises to be his ears in the world. The arrival of a long-awaited telephone is a major event for Maj and Ewald, and meanwhile their neighbour, recently widowed Fru Vik, tentatively takes up with the owner of the bookshop near the cemetery. The bar at Hotel Bristol becomes a meeting place for all of them – for Ewald and his advertising colleagues, for Fru Vik and her suitor, to the piano playing of hapless Enzo Zanetti, an immigrant down on his luck, who enables Jesper to discover his true passion.
The minutes of the local Red Cross meetings give an architecture to the narrative of so many lives and tell a story in themselves, bearing witness to the steady recovery of the community. Echoes of the City is a remarkably tender observation of the rhythms and passions of a city, and a particular salute to the resilience of its women.
Fallen Angels by Gunnar Staalesen – BERGEN
Exploring his own dark memories may be the only way to find a killer.
When Bergen PI Varg Veum finds himself at the funeral of a former classmate on a sleet-grey December afternoon, he’s unexpectedly reunited with his old friend Jakob guitarist of the once-famous 1960s rock band The Harpers and his estranged wife, Rebecca, Veum’s first love.
Their rekindled friendship is thrown into jeopardy by the discovery of a horrific murder, and Veum is forced to dig deep into his own adolescence and his darkest memories, to find a motive and a killer.
Tense, vivid and deeply unsettling, Fallen Angels is the spellbinding, award-winning thriller that secured Gunnar Staalesen’s reputation as one of the world’s foremost crime writers.
Killed by Thomas Enger – OSLO
Crime reporter Henning Juul thought his life was over when his young son was murdered. But that was only the beginning…
Determined to find his son’s killer, Henning doggedly follows an increasingly dangerous trail, where dark hands from the past emerge to threaten everything. His ex-wife Nora is pregnant with another man’s child, his sister Trine is implicated in the fire that killed his son and, with everyone he thought he could trust seemingly hiding something, Henning has nothing to lose … except his own life.
Packed with tension and unexpected twists, Killed is the long-awaited finale of one of the darkest, most chilling and emotive series you may ever read. Someone will be killed. But who?
The Bird Tribunal by Agnes Ravatn – NORWAY
TV presenter Allis Hagtorn leaves her partner and her job to take voluntary exile in a remote house on an isolated fjord. But her new job as housekeeper and gardener is not all that it seems, and her silent, surly employer, 44-year-old Sigurd Bagge, is not the old man she expected. As they await the return of his wife from her travels, their silent, uneasy encounters develop into a chilling, obsessive relationship, and it becomes clear that atonement for past sins may not be enough.
Haunting, consuming and powerful, The Bird Tribunal is a taut, exquisitely written psychological thriller that builds to a shocking, dramatic crescendo that will leave you breathless.
The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein – LOFOTEN
In the beautiful, barren landscape of the Far North, under the ever-present midnight sun, Frances and Yasha are surprised to find refuge in each other. Their lives have been upended – Frances has fled heartbreak and claustrophobic Manhattan for an isolated artist colony; Yasha, a Russian immigrant raised in a bakery in Brighton Beach, arrives from Brooklyn to fulfill his beloved father’s last wish: to be buried ‘at the top of the world’. They have come to learn how to be alone.
But in Lofoten, an archipelago of six tiny islands in the Norwegian Sea, ninety-five miles north of the Arctic Circle, they form a bond that fortifies them against the turmoil of their distant homes, offering solace amidst great uncertainty. With nimble and sure-footed prose enriched with humour and warmth, Rebecca Dinerstein’s enchanting debut reminds us that no matter how far we travel to claim our own territory, it is love that gives us our place in the world.
Cabin Fever by Alex Dahl – OSLO, TELEMARK
Alone and isolated in a vast Scandinavian forest, a therapist begins to read her client’s novel manuscript, only to discover the main character is terrifyingly familiar…
You are her therapist.
Kristina is a successful therapist in central Oslo. She spends her days helping clients navigate their lives with a cool professionalism that has got her to the top.
She is your client.
But when her client Leah, a successful novelist, arrives at her office clearly distressed, begging Kristina to come to her remote cabin in the woods, she feels the balance begin to slip.
But out here in the woods.
When Leah fails to turn up to her next two sessions, Kristina reluctantly heads out into the wilderness to find her.
Nothing is as it seems.
Alone and isolated, Kristina finds Leah’s unfinished manuscript, and as she reads she realises the main character is terrifyingly familiar…
Enjoy our selection of great Norwegian literature!
Tony for the TripFiction team
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