Helga Flatland - Selected Title Author

What is your book about?

One warm early-summer day, a heavy truck drives through the town of Skien. It’s carrying an excavator bound for Google’s new data center, and along the way, it passes an old community center where the Skien Independent Brass Band is in the process of moving in. When the vibrations from the truck reach the building, the roof collapses on the three people inside: Anton, Birgitte, and Ebba. It’s an undeniable catastrophe. Or perhaps not? What difference do three ordinary lives really make in this world, after all?

Anton is struggling with a legacy of violence in anger-management therapy. Ebba, an aging feminist, is trying to hold on to what once gave her life meaning. Birgitte has lost her footing during menopause and experiences, for the first time, what it means to be invisible.

Nowhere Fast is a novel about how power and powerlessness are negotiated in relationships, about obligation and compassion, and about how we go on with our lives – even as the world is falling apart around us.

What inspired you to write this book?

We live our lives in parallel with overwhelming, dystopian events happening throughout the world. And yet we keep plodding along with this looming darkness on the horizon – without it seeming to affect our daily existence to any great extent. I wanted to write a novel that draws its premise from this duality: the small and the big, the banal and the existential.

Throughout my writing career, I’ve always been curious about the driving forces within us, and Nowhere Fast is no exception. In this novel, I explore, among other things, anger – a feeling often regarded as destructive and problematic, but which is also a vital and productive force.

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