The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland
Jane Ashlands gradvise forsvinning
She read that it usually ends with you undressing. One last fatal misunderstanding of the situation. So there you are, in your underwear, taut skin blue from the cold, large eyes numb and frozen. And, finally, draped in a shroud of fresh snow that must gently be brushed away once you are found. In the fog, she looks no different than a boulder within arm’s reach. And if she tilts her head to the left, the orange tent covered in white frost begins to look like a mouldy orange.
An American woman wakes up alone in a tent in the Norwegian mountains. Outside there is a storm and the fog is dense. Her cell phone is dead. She doesn’t have a map or a compass or any food. She actually came to Norway to seek out distant relatives, but when her trip goes awry she contacts a zoologist she met by chance on the plane. She ends up accompanying him on a musk oxen hike through the Dovrefjell mountain range, but here too everything goes wrong.
Out of the mist a picture gradually emerges of a past, a personal disaster, and a desperate search for new meaning. Even those you have lost everything, still have something to lose.
In The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland, Houm displays great psychological insight and paints a unique portrait of sadness that is impossible not to be moved by.
Winner of the Norwegian Book Blogger Award 2016 (Best Novel)
“an austerely wrenching and darkly comic novel…a psychological study of the reverberations of trauma, its impact deepens even as its suspense lessens, resulting in a winning novel.”
Publishers Weekly
‘(…) combines both surgically precise observations with the pace and attention to detail as the best tv-series. The similarities with Don De Lillo and Jonathan Franzen cannot be denied.’
Dagens Næringsliv
