The island of Otteroya, a rural backwater of Norway, provides the setting for Book Two of Tiller’s multi-award winning Encircling trilogy. Its singular premise continues: an enigmatic central character, David, has lost his memory and his friends and family write letters at the behest of his psychiatrist about the lives they once shared. The encircling narratives offered by two childhood friends and the midwife who attended his birth, reveal both the roots of his waywardness and, in a shocking twist, the traumatic secret of his identity. Tiller uses a carefully scored polyphony of voices to present this epic saga of dysfunctional lives misshapen by poverty. As in the work of our own Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, its strength lies in its close domestic focus. Encircling: Book 2 is an intimate and modern portrait of Norwegian life that is both searingly honest and uncomfortably true. Encircling 2 is the second volume of a multi-award winning trilogy, published to acclaim in Norway.
Author
Carl Frode Tiller
Carl Frode Tiller (born 4 January 1970 in Namsos) is a Norwegian author, historian and musician. His works are in Nynorsk (lit. ‘New Norwegian’), one of the two official Norwegian standard languages.
Tiller made his literary debut in 2001 with the novel Skråninga (The Slope), which was recognized as the best Norwegian literary debut of the year. In November 2007 he was awarded the Brage Prize and Norwegian Critic’s Prize for his novel Encircling (the first of a trilogy by the same title). He went on to receive the European Prize for Literature and a nomination for the premiere Scandinavian literature prize, the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for the sequel, Encircling II. The last of the trilogy, Encircling III, was published to critical acclaim in Norway, in 2014.
Translator
Barbara J. Haveland
Winner of the 1997 Kjeld Elfelt Award for translation.
Barbara Haveland (born 1951) is an erstwhile Scottish bookseller who moved to Copenhagen in 1988 with her Norwegian husband and son. In 1999 she and her family moved to Norway where they lived for four years before returning to Denmark. Among the many Danish and Norwegian authors she has translated are Peter Høeg, Claus Jensen, Jan Kjærstad, Linn Ullmann and Henrik Ibsen.
Published by
Sort of Books, 2017
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The island of Otteroya, a rural backwater of Norway, provides the setting for Book Two of Tiller’s multi-award winning Encircling trilogy. Its singular premise continues: an enigmatic central character, David, has lost his memory and his friends and family write letters at the behest of his psychiatrist about the lives they once shared. The encircling narratives offered by two childhood friends and the midwife who attended his birth, reveal both the roots of his waywardness and, in a shocking twist, the traumatic secret of his identity. Tiller uses a carefully scored polyphony of voices to present this epic saga of dysfunctional lives misshapen by poverty. As in the work of our own Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, its strength lies in its close domestic focus. Encircling: Book 2 is an intimate and modern portrait of Norwegian life that is both searingly honest and uncomfortably true. Encircling 2 is the second volume of a multi-award winning trilogy, published to acclaim in Norway.