Everything Like Before

From one of the greatest Norwegian authors of the twentieth century comes a collection of spare biting stories of people caught between reality and expectation hope and despair love and longing.. 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. Small flashes like the promise of a sunhat a nail in a cherry tree or a raised flag reveal the interminable space between desire and reality in which Askildsen's characters are forever suspended. Widely recognized as one of the greatest modern short-story writers with unadorned prose and a dark humor Askildsen captures life as it really is the worlds of his characters uncanny mirrors of our own.