AshehougAgency

Honour

The timid and weakly Torgrim Torgeir Torsteinsson grows up on the Hovland apple farm deep inside a fjord in South Western Norway. Two people loom over his childhood: his father Torstein Torgrimsson, a silent earth bound farmer and inventor of a new, not very popular apple sort, and his grand father Torgrim Torsteinsson, a yarn-spinning former casual labourer and the boy’s best friend. The boy fears his father and adores his grandfather, whereas the two men feel nothing but contempt for each other. But when the honour of their family is at stake and neighbouring farmers need to be taught a lesson, they all come together.

Far from the reach of well meaning child welfare workers the boy little by little acquires the spectacularly anachronistic pre-christian values of the older men. He listens to his grandfathers wild stories of rowdy and violent life in the early industrial era, he fights other children and he joins his father and grandfather in bizarre endeavours to gain honour and glory for the family.

HONOUR takes the reader on a baroque and hilarious journey through myths, tall tales, rap influenced skald songs and fistfights, all told in an inventive prose that makes the book read like a burlesque Viking saga.

Praise for HONOUR:

”Three generations of men on an applefarm in Hardanger; a masterly adventure epic, as effective as calvados ... [a] wild, hilarous novel.”
(Adresseavisen)

”In the middle of all the madness, Honour feels like a completely relevant book for our time, also for those who haven’t grown up by the Hardanger fjord singing odes while maiming their neighbours.”
(Dagens Næringsliv)

”Seljestad expands his repertoire with humour and language, and by playing with genres ... HONOUR is a peculiar book, but in a nice way.”
(Klassekampen)

First published: 2009, Aschehoug
Lars Ove Seljestad: Biography and bibliography