Aliss at the Fire — WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of family and the battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great-grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on. Aliss at the Fire, is a visionary masterpiece, a haunting exploration of love and loss that ranks among the greatest meditations on marriage and human fate.

‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’ — Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, ‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’ — Le Monde, ‘Jon Fosse has managed, like few others, to carve out a literary form of his own.’ — Nordic Council Literary Prize, ‘It is some measure of Fosse’s talents that he manages to weave such a compelling narrative from a largely static setting ... Nothing really happens and yet there is something quietly dramatic about Fosse's meandering and rhythmic prose, aided by Damion Searls's limber translation, which has a strangely mesmerising effect. ... [A]n intense reading experience.’ — Lucy Popescu, Independent, ‘Fosse carefully captures the contradictions…It is hard not to marvel at what peace and sorrow he fits into a single thought…’ — George Berridge, TLS

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books and over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’.