Per Petterson

"Thirty-five years ago, two boys were everything to each other. Tommy and his three sisters had been left alone with their abusive father after their mother walked out on them. Without Jim, Tommy might not have made it. Now, a chance encounter on a bridge outside Oslo has brought them together. Jim was fishing in the gray dawn when Tommy pulled up in a handsome new Mercedes. The meeting has unsettled both men, and over the course of the day to come,...

Anticipating a divorce against a backdrop of the fall of communism, Arvid Jansen is further dismayed by his mother's diagnosis with cancer, a situation that prompts his emotionally charged quest for understanding and balance.

In the years before the Nazis arrive, two young people growing up in Danish Jutland have dreams of leaving their frigid coastal town while coping with distant parents, eccentric family members, and the cold winds. In the aftermath of their grandfather's suicide, the arrival of puberty and most tragically, the German invasion, their idyllic childhood changes forever.

"Echoland is the powerful and emotionally resonant first novel from Per Petterson. Written in the mold of his early story collection Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, it features a young Arvid Jansen, who is now twelve, on the verge of his teenage years and beginning to understand more about the world and his place in it. Set over the course of a single formative summer, the novel captures a series of episodes from Arvid's long visit to his grandparents'...