The Five Seasons

In the autumn of 2012 Gaute Heivoll gets to see his grandfather’s many film recordings from the spring and summer of 1978. He sees his grandmother, his young parents and, not least, himself as a newborn baby. The most prominent feature of the films, however, is the garden, which his grandparents cultivated with great love and tenderness.
He wants to paint. When he retires, he shall finally have time. He has spent 34 years working as a train conductor on the Oslo-Stavanger line, during which period he has covered a distance equal to 59 circumnavigations. But now he is heading home. To his painting. To his garden. To her. But the coming year turns out quite differently than he expected.
In The Five Seasons Heivoll brings back a lost world that is small in circumference, but which lacks nothing in terms of abundance and wealth. This is a novel about keeping badgers and moose at bay, about providing sufficient water for the flowers, about love and companionship. It is a novel about dying, but even more so about life – about the fragility of life, about holding on to life, about trying to find and create meaning even as death approaches.