Lars Saabye Christensen – författare

We've all stood on a street corner and let the city's lights and sounds pass by. What do we hear when we listen to the sounds of the city? What traces do they leave in us? The city and the streets are the same as before, but the people who emerge in Echoes of a City have never been seen before. At the centre are Ewald and Maj Kristoffersen, but their fates are closely interwoven with the streets they live on. Down the road a couple has a butcher's shop. They have a son, Jostein, who goes deaf after a traffic accident. Jesper, Ewald and Maj's son, promises to be his ears in the world. The butcher couple and the widow Mrs Vik have a telephone, but not the Kristoffersen family. Jesper takes piano lessons, Mrs Vik meets the widower Olaf Hall who runs the second-hand bookshop at the cemetery. His stepson, Bjørn Stranger, is the one who saves Jostein's life when he gets run over.There are few - if any - who can conjure up a time and place in a way that makes it alive for us here and now like Lars Saabye Christensen.

Set in post-war Oslo and following on from Echoes of a City, by an author who understands the city like no other."One of Norway's finest writers" GUARDIAN"Profoundly resonant" TLSIn Kirkeveien, Oslo, in the year 1956, forty-year-old Maj is worn down by being a homemaker and widowed mother. To the indignation of the Red Cross ladies, she cautiously frees herself from the role she has otherwise fulfilled to the letter. She finds a job that she turns out to be more than good at, and some kind of love, too. Her friend Margrethe is sick of her marriage to the antiquarian bookseller, Olaf Hall, but cannot think of divorce. Jesper gets a girlfriend who opens the door to a new, more liberated environment of vegetarianism and politics. And his best friend Jostein realises that his talent for making money will allow him access to a world that is larger and richer than that of the Oslo slaughterhouse.Friendship is a beautifully orchestrated story about people and their dreams, about social conventions, personal constraints and what it takes to have the courage to realise oneself. In this book brimming with human insight, as in Echoes of the City, in each of these characters we recognise something of ourselves.