Walking Man
Fars rygg
Taking old documents, letters and photos as his starting point, the narrator tries to piece together the story of his late father’s childhood. It is an extraordinary, but cold childhood, marked by loneliness, dreams and yearning: In Egypt, where the boy’s father, The Judge, keeps his wife and young son in a colonial iron grip; in the home of strangers in an Oslo suburb; at a boarding school in Geneva, and in hotel rooms up and down through Europe, as the continent is heading for another great war.
Tender, dark and at the same time full of humour, Walking Man is an unforgettable portrait of a boy and a young man’s struggle to live in a world he doesn’t understand, but still tries to be a part of, of the people around him, and of the fateful time he grew up in, It’s also the story of the boy’s mother, herself desperate and full of yearning.
Niels Fredrik Dahl has written a captivating novel about family and love in the 20th century, about a boy and a mother connected by loneliness, and about a loneliness passed down from one generation to the next.
Winner of the 2024 Nordic Council Literature Prize
‘Intoxicating about loneliness and loss… The novel is one of the best, most poignant, soberest, most elegant, and touching I have read in a very long time… It’s a story filled with longing but also devotion, glamour, and a curiosity for life.’
Dagbladet
‘… the story of a child, and an adult, who never felt like he belonged. A beautiful novel about hereditary loneliness.’
NRK
‘A kind of Narnia for adults, where the crystal-clear shifts between different timelines in the novel cut like a dip in icy fjord water … How is a life created, and who have you become when everything is over?’
Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden)
