AshehougAgency

The person you are calling is not available at the moment

Magnar is afraid of dying alone and brings his sleeping bag to the main street in Oslo. Frode has broken both his arms and is not able to tell his deaf wife what has happened. Eline sits by her bedroom window at her own party, determined to jump if nobody comes looking for her. Flight mechanic Roar has an oppressive feeling that something is very, very wrong.

In the collection of short stories we meet 15 different people during one cold winter night. Their stories intertwine, the result being a loosely-knitted tale about loneliness and everyday longing. The failure in communication is literal: The mobile network is down, and despite the characters' many attempts to connect, they fail.

Praise for The person you are calling is not available at the moment:

"A literary debut like this rarely comes along. The themes are not sensational: love, aging, death, loneliness. But they are so elegantly handled. Seeing life from a bird's-eye view, how people jab into each other and only barely reach each other, the reader observes the subtle line between life and death, happiness and disaster. The stories' endings are disturbingly open. This literary debut is excellent publicity for Aschehoug's writing school, where the more-than-promising Niemi has been a student."
(Dagbladet)

"A well composed and stylistically consistent literary debut. (...) Niemi introduces us to a raw and sore humanity in a simple and believable way. Never undermining the gravity of the situations, she describes great crises in a stringent and everyday language. (...) Niemi masters the art of writing unpretentiously and precisely; her novel tells us just enough."
(Stavanger Aftenblad)

First published: 2009, Aschehoug Fiction
Lena Niemi: Biography and Bibliography