A Worker’s Heart - Book 1
Arbeidarhjerte 1
Trond got what he wanted.
He grew up in a rural working-class environment in the 1970s and 1980s, his father a sawmill worker and card-carrying communist, his mother a nursing assistant who broke with her puritan Christian family. But Trond had higher ambitions. He studied at university, married the bourgeois Therese and eased into a middle-class life. He got just what he wanted – but now he has lost it. He has lost his job, divorced his wife, and he doesn’t understand his daughters. He is at constant war with both his surroundings and himself.
Elegantly shifting between Trond’s present and past, A Worker’s Heart is a novel about the great social and political changes of the past decades. But it’s also a story about the impact that these greater changes have on our most intimate relationships, about rage and desperation, about love and longing.
This is the first book of a two-volume work. The second book is scheduled for publication autumn 2025.
Nominated for the 2024 Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize
‘Razor-sharp from Carl Frode Tiller. […] Self-assertion, embarrassment, and longing for recognition: Hardly anyone depicts the complicated family life better than him.’
VG, 5/6 stars
‘Tiller writes masterfully about a man who, midway through life, begins to despise what he has achieved […] This is great literature about the eternal flow of life’s challenges. […] In recent years, Norwegian authors have managed to combine literary weight with bestseller potential […] Think of Vigdis Hjorth, Linn Ullmann, Karl Ove Knausgård, Per Petterson, and Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse. Carl Frode Tiller is also part of this wave of success.’
Jyllands-Posten (Denmark), 5/6 stars
