Echoes of the City by Lars Saabye Christensen

£12.99

Julie’s review:

Set in Oslo after the Second World War, the newly founded Red Cross meeting minutes are effectively used in each chapter as a framework for this warm and empathetic story about the residents of a particular street.

Translated from Norwegian, this pared back style drew me in until by the end,  I felt like I had lived among these wonderful characters with their flaws, foibles, hopes and dreams, I knew them so well, so finding out this was the first of a trilogy was great news to me!

 

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ISBN: 9780857059161 Category: Tags: , ,

Description

As Oslo slowly emerges from a period of crippling austerity, ‘Echoes of the City’ shows how small, almost imperceptible acts of kindness and compassion, and tiny shifts in fortune, can change the lives of many. At the centre of the novel are Maj and Ewald Kristoffersen and their son Jesper, their lives closely entwined and overlapping with their neighbours’ on Kirkeveien. When the butcher’s son Jostein is knocked down in a traffic accident and loses his hearing, Jesper promises to be his ears in the world. The arrival of a long-awaited telephone is a major event for Maj and Ewald, and meanwhile their neighbour, recently widowed Fru Vik, tentatively takes up with the owner of the bookshop near the cemetery.