A man and a woman in a quiet, remote house, an old man on a park bench, an estranged brother in a railway café – Kjell Askildsen’s characters are surrounded by absence. Filled with disquiet, and longing, they walk to a fjord, they smoke, they drink on a veranda, they listen to conversations that drift through open windows. With unadorned prose and a dark humor, Askildsen captures life as it really is, the worlds of his characters uncanny mirrors of our own.