AshehougAgency

Armless Strikes Back

Becca and Vanja meet and become lovers. Vanja is the narrator of this story, which is almost exclusively about Becca. Becca hooks up with just about everyone she meets, both men and women. And comes back to Vanja every time. Together, these two girls lead a life on the margins of a more and more prosperous and conservative Norway. Armless Strikes Back is a powerful and energetic love story. At the same time, the book is both political and controversial, it is written in a rhythmic spoken word tradition, with directness, excess and in a language closely related to music.

Praise for Armless Strikes Back:

“An ingenious study” (VG)

”An experiment that mixes love, pain and energy in a poetic and vital way”
(Adresseavisen)

”Brilliant dreams...Lie has written a challenging but exquisite novel about love and deperate dreams… a powerful first novel… When Lie is at her best – and she often is – the novel gains a fantastic rhythm and intensity”
(Trønder-Avisa)

“A promising and gratifying first novel; and the publisher is welcome to quote me on that”
(Morgenbladet)

“A nightmarish odyssey, a pitch black, surreal journey, which is at times tremendously funny… the reader gets a new perspective on what Vanja calls her personal reality. In the presentation of this personal reality, a new form of stream of consciousness is born; a stream of consciousness anno 2005. And it is utterly refreshing”
(Fredrikstads blad)

“An original, experimental, at times witty and surreal first novel”
(Stavanger Aftenblad)

“An impressive and bold effort by an author who dares to go her own way. It is far in between novelistic experiments of this kind in Norway. And there are even fewer who succeed in completing their experiments with the strength and security that this novel is marked by”
(Hamar Arbeiderblad)

“An unusual and disquieting novel, so strange you simply has to keep reading”
(Mag)

“Impulsive and improvising, ironic and aloof, intimate and vulnerable, critical and funny, absurd and dramatic”
(Vinduet)

First published: 2005, Forlaget Oktober

Lisa Charlotte Baudouin Lie: Biography and bibliography