The Year

Tomas Espedal is a contemporary Norwegian writer whose work is closely tied to his own experiences. His first book, Tramp, introduced the wanderer Tomas. Against Art described how a boy approaches art and becomes a writer. Against Nature looked at the labour of love that writing involves, and in Bergerners he is pulled between affection for his home town and the world beyond it.

The Year is the journal of a twelve-month period, a diary unlike most. Here Espedal struggles to bring his inner life into line with the outside world, and to set love, hate, loss and death, both personal and literary, against the fixed pattern of time and the seasons. Running through it are questions posed by Petrarch. How do you go on living when the person you love is gone? And when your life force turns from spring to autumn, how do you find a good death?

Written as one long poem, the book is a stream of consciousness that is profound, edgy, at times manic, and always deeply intimate.