Publishers Weekly
02/14/2022
Jacobsen completes his trilogy (after White Shadow) with this expressive story of a woman’s search for her lover in post-WWII Norway. In summer 1946, Ingrid Barrøy takes her infant daughter, Kaja, from their small Norwegian island in search of Kaja’s father Alexander, the former Russian prisoner of war who survived a terrible shipwreck in the previous volume. As Ingrid attempts to trace Alexander’s movements in Sweden, she persuades people to share memories of the war that most would rather forget. She stays briefly with a shopkeeper who collaborated with the Germans, then with a woman who hid Alexander on her farm. Despite being given some misdirection and told he must have died, Ingrid trudges onward, sometimes doubling back, until she meets Henrik Axelsen, who narrowly survived a harrowing winter with Alexander. When Henrik shares troubling details about Alexander, Ingrid makes a consequential choice about her search. The translators inventively capture Ingrid’s dialect (“An’ thas knew this all th’taim”) as well as the power of the tense interactions between the characters. This delicate account of yearning perfectly caps the strong series. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Eyes of the Rigel
"This delicate account of yearning perfectly caps the strong series."
—Publishers Weekly
"Eyes of the Rigel is a triumph of fearless storytelling and intense examination of the human condition."
—Open Book
Praise for The Barrøy Chronicles
"Richer, even more provocative ... The heroine of Roy Jacobsen’s White Shadow knows every inch of her home turf, a tiny island off the coast of northern Norway that her people have inhabited for generations. To get a full sense of what it’s like to subsist on Barrøy and how 35-year-old Ingrid comes to be living there alone, it helps to read The Unseen, the first volume in Jacobsen’s trilogy, which has also been translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. But even without that background, the novel’s account of Ingrid’s experience of World War II is unsettlingly easy to follow."
—New York Times
"White Shadow retains many of The Unseen’s pleasures, not least Jacobsen’s clean, spare prose ... a noble tribute to the human struggle for decency."
—Daniel Marc Janes, Times Literary Supplement
"Disarmingly plainspoken narration brings into sharp relief both individuals and a world in wartime crisis."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A powerful read."
—David Mills, Sunday Times
"The turbulent outside world laps at weathered, ancient shores in Jacobsen’s stunning follow-up to The Unseen (one of the great unsung masterpieces of last year) ... In this elegant, sparse novel, every moment is laden with significance as its denizens teeter between brutal memory and resilient hope. This is a book to be savored."
—Buzzfeed
"A profound interrogation of freedom and fate, as well as a fascinating portrait of a vanished time, written in prose as clear and washed clean as the world after a storm.”
—The Guardian
"The subtle translation, with its invented dialect, conveys a timeless, provincial voice ... The Unseen is a blunt, brilliant book."
—Financial Times
"A beautifully written and profoundly moving exploration of conflict, love and human endurance."
—St. Catherines Standard
