Allen & Unwin Encircling book Fiction English Paperback 368 pages

One of the great contemporary portraits of Nordic Life.

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.

Carl Frode Tiller was born in Namsos in 1970. He is the author of five novels and four plays all written in Nynorsk (new Norwegian). His Encircling trilogy has won the EU Prize for Literature; the Nordic Critic's Prize and been nominated twice for the Nordic Council's Prize.