My dead man

My Dead Man centers on the meeting and brief, secret relationship between the nameless narrator, who has a wife and children, and another man, Aksel. After meeting on the internet, they spend little more than a few hours together at Aksel’s desolate house by the coast, before a chance meeting brings an adventurous boy into the equation. Soon after, the narrator learns that Aksel has fallen to his death from a nearby cliff. To the narrator Aksel’s death echoes stories of other men who have died, particularly that of his first male lover.

Beautifully written and elegantly composed, Arne Lygre’s elegiac, powerful novel My Dead Man captures the loneliness of the individual, distances between us that cannot be covered, but also unexpected intimacy and sudden passion. The novel tackles essential elements of our existence: unrest, pressures, drives – and longing for something beyond one’s reach. It’s about one man’s meetings with other men and himself, and about love that cannot be controlled.

Praise:

‘A special, gripping and serious novel, which is difficult to put aside.”
Anne Merethe K. Prinos, Aftenposten

Aschehoug 2009