Eyes of the Rigel

by Roy Jacobsen, Don Barlett (Translator), Don Shaw (Translator)

Overview

The highly anticipated third novel in a historical series that began with International Booker-shortlisted The Unseen

The war is over, and Ingrid Barrøy leaves the island that shares her name to search for the father of her daughter. Alexander, the Russian POW who survived the sinking of the Rigel, has attempted to cross the mountains to Sweden, and now Ingrid follows, carrying their child in her arms, the girl’s dark eyes and a handwritten note her only mementoes of their relationship. Along the way she will encounter partisans and collaborators, refugees and deserters, sinners and servants in a country still bearing the scars of occupation—and before her journey’s end, she’ll be forced to ask herself how well she really knows the man she’s risking everything to find.

Preceded by the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Unseen and the critically acclaimed White Shadow, Eyes of the Rigel is an unforgettable odyssey and a captivating investigation of memory, guilt, and hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771964760
Publisher:	Biblioasis
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Series:	The Barrøy Chronicles , #3
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Born in Oslo to a family that came from northern Norway, Roy Jacobsen has twice been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literary Award. He is the author of more than fifteen novels and is a member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Award for his novel The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles. Another novel, Child Wonder, won the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. The Unseen, the first of a series of novels about Ingrid and her family, was a phenomenal bestseller in Norway and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize and the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award, selected as a 2020 Indie Next pick in North America, and named a New York Times New and Noteworthy book. White Shadow, the second Barrøy novel, was published in North America by Biblioasis in 2021.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly

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

From the Publisher