Tag: Norwegian story

On the Couch with Lars Mytting

Interveiw with Lars Mitting at Featherston Book Town Festival

Interviewing Lars Mytting at the Featherston Book Town Festival in May this year was a real treat. I’m a big fan, have read all his books, love the mix of engineering precision and intimate family saga in his writing, and so I jumped at the offer of being “on the couch” with Norway’s most famous literary woodsman, hoping he would be as interesting as his books. And he so was! The man is a joy to talk with and an absolute honey.

We talked about growing up in Norway and deer shooting in Featherston, old stories hidden beneath the new, things underground, and a bit of dark rural gothic, woodpiles, fame, herding cows, Saxon feet and old Norwegian ways to drink coffee. We talked about his character Kai Sweigaard realising that the future will judge us, and the truth behind the co-joined twins. I asked about his latest book, set in Norway during WWII and he was extraordinarily open about the evolution of shared histories between Germany and Norway and the pain of the misappropriation of legends and symbols that powered the Nazi regime. Just wow.

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The Reindeer Hunters-book review

The Reindeer Hunters, by Lars Mytting

It’s been a while since I read The Bell in the Lake (which I loved). The Reindeer Hunters is the second in Mytting’s Sister Bells trilogy and I do recommend you read/refresh the opening novel first, mainly because it’s so damn good but also because this next would be hard to navigate without the earlier history of the Stave Church and how it came to be in Dresden and what happened to Astrid and the bells and who were the Hekne Sisters…and so on. It is a complicated plot spanning a few generations and secrets.

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The Mercies—book review

The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

I was given this book for Christmas and was so excited. Right up my street. Historical—1600s—a sea journey, Norway, an island setting, a storm, a bunch of women surviving remote and desolate lives. What’s not to like?

I was well into this story before I read the blurb a bit more carefully and discovered what’s not to like. The witch trials. They’re based on fact.

What is it with these blokes in power who see strong women as such a threat that they have to burn them at the stake? A woman has poppets in her house. She wears trousers. Burn her!

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The Bell in the Lake – book review

The Bell in the Lake, by Lars Mytting

Norway, 1880. So cold a woman leaned against a wall in church and froze to death, her skin stuck to the wall. No wonder my ancestors left. I love stories like this that are so atmospheric you need to wrap yourself in a blanket to read them.

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