· an intriguing story featuring all of the Petterson quirks — charm, melancholy, loneliness, the rifts between parents and children, the bonds between siblings and friends

Beautifully written and understatedly uplifting, It's Fine By Me is an essential read

Beguiling and beautiful… a gripping and subtle coming-of-age story, ripe with melancholy… graceful and moving

Executed with not only a magical attention to detail but also with heart-swelling affection... page after page of clear, glitchless and truthful writing

A movingly observed story about growing up

A brilliantly vivid piece of storytelling

Atmospheric coming-of-age tale by one of Norway’s most renowned writers

The detail is perfect; the emotions are raw and beautifully conveyed

Petterson’s novel is a compelling study… Petterson’s beautifully spare prose subtly captures the effort that comes with this seeming inaction, this lack of fight, providing us with a lens through which we come to see Audun’s grim inertia as a paralyzing struggle to forget the past and get on with the task of living

Beautifully crafted but undeniably bleak; its spare prose, mournfully succinct characterisation and disorientating chronology deliver an edgy read

Melancholic

Covering the twenty years that turned Catherine the Great from a young bride on approval to the legendary Empress of Russia, Eva Stachniak's novel gives a magical insight into the hopes and fears that haunted the corridors of the St Petersburg palace. It brings alive the very tastes and textures of the mid-eighteenth century

An intimate portrait of 18th century girl-power

A wry moral tale exploring the little evasions and compromises of everyday life. Translator Agnes Scott does justice to Solstad’s measured voice

This short-but-striking novel quickly reveals itself to be…crime fiction, yes, but also a subtle and deeply introspective consideration of the inertia of lonely middle-age, its philosophy existentialist in the manner of Jean Paul Sartre, Ingmar Bergman and certain novels of Georges Simenon. The result is a highly complex and accomplished work

Intriguing tale… Solstad expertly navigates the bizarre mind of a clever but lonely man locked in an existentialist nightmare

This is no straightforward crime novel…an exploration of guilt, inaction and moral quandaries