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A Tiger for an Angel

Lotte is eight years old when her parents are divorced, and soon after, her father moves in with his new girlfriend and her two children. Lotte’s mother is grief-stricken and angry, and Lotte finds herself in a warzone, torn between her parents, and she is fighting hard to create a place for herself in this new and chaotic reality. Luckily, she is going to her grandparents’ farm for the whole summer, and for a while, she finds solace in the company of the animals and the mountains. But no summer can last forever.

Set in the 60s, when a divorce was far more stigmatizing occurrence than today, “A Tiger for an Angel” foreshadows many of the themes that have later become the hallmark of Ragde’s writing: The conflict between traditional life on small farms and the modern reality of the emerging suburbs, and the loneliness and difficult communication that can so often be found within a family.

Praise for A TIGER FOR AN ANGEL:

“Ragde has succeded in giving a voice, a face, a personality to Lotte. Lotte is no social case, she is quite simply a small human child whose secure world has been irreversibly shattered.”
(Aftenposten)

“written in a confident prose and with impressive dialogues, which reveal neither too much nor too little … a joy to read.”
(Bergens Tidende)

“Ragde has a feel for language and a structural confidence which pull the reader directly into little Lotte’s feeling of loneliness … the writing is tight, the sentences short and efficient. The effect is powerful.”
(Adresseavisen)

“Very few writers manage to penetrate the mysterious workings of a child’s mind and shed light on its unconscious life as successfully as this without resorting to sentimentality … Ragde is concrete, crass and constructive – this concerns everybody.”
(Ny Tid)

First published: 1990, Cappelen
Anne B. Ragde: Biography and bibliography

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