Johan Harstad - Selected Title Author

What is your book about?

Ingmar Olsen is in Warsaw, at a conference about the final storage of radioactive waste, when he is approached by an American with disturbing knowledge about the suburb Ingmar grew up in and about his childhood friends. Just hours later, one of them calls, for the first time in nineteen years, insisting that they meet in Stavanger to finish what had been started in the yellow house beside the decommissioned Kubikel reactor; something that had eventually driven them in different directions.

Under the Paving-Stones, the Beach! revolves around the discovery of a paving-stone-shaped object which, when touched, supposedly creates the illusion of experiencing a whole lifetime in just over seven minutes. Centred around a group of teenagers in late-nineties Stavanger, but containing significant temporal and geographical detours to places like Berlin, Siberia, Akureyri, Shanghai, not least the island of Tristan da Cunha in the sixties, and populated by everything from Cold War spies whose loyalties waver in multiple directions, to cannabis wholesalers of dubious mental caliber, young lovers, amateur radio dads who are all widowers, old-school sailors and new-school sailors, Icelandic eco-terrorists, adventurous meteorologists and an astrophysicist who urgently needs to explain himself, the novel explores the idea that time was perhaps never on our side after all.

This is a story about waiting, for life to begin, for things to pass, about waiting for the right one, waiting for death and waiting in vain. It is a novel about Ingmar, Jonatan and Peter. And Ebba.

Who is this book for?

This is a novel for those willing to do something that appears to require a degree of courage these days, namely to sit alone in a room and read intently. It is a novel for anyone protesting our collectively declining attention span and faltering ability to concentrate, a novel for anyone protesting society’s tendency to make everything quicker, simpler, more easily digestible and uncomplicated. A novel for those who also fear the consequences of a society founded on prejudice rather than insight. A novel for those who don’t just read a newspaper headline, but the whole article, and then the obituaries. It is a novel for those who are still interested in literature and its ability to create mental spaces that can inhabited by those brave enough to enter, with walls all around them, and come out again with new ideas.

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Read more about the author here

See all NORLA’s Selected Titles for the autumn 2024 here