The Seducer

Successful and charismatic TV producer Jonas Wergeland returns from Seville to find his wife murdered in the living room. This is the beginning of a series of dramatic events through which the hero's sensational life story unfolds. The Seducer is an easily-read, exciting and erotic book - a great collection of good stories.

This book is the first of the trilogy centring on the chequered career of Jonas Wergeland, which won the prestigious Nordic Prize for Literature 2001.

Praise for The Seducer:

"An enormously accomplished and compelling novel by one of Scandinavia's outstanding contemporary writers"
(Paul Auster)

“Not often is a novel of this calibre published in Norway. Abroad, too, it happens a lot more infrequently than one would think”
(Bergens Tidende)

" The Seducer is a playful, interrogative meditation on storytelling, the imagination and Norway: a book that, without blushing, will remind you to take note of the miraculous details of life, as well as to strive for the new, spectacular and different at all times. ... he champions Antarctica, Pluto and the Comoros islands, visits China and Zambezi river, discusses Duke Ellington and Liv Ullmann. In the end the novel is encapsulated in this description of the dreams of his youthful friends: 'so grand, so outrageous, so extravagantly naïve, and, above all: so insanely beautiful'"
(The Guardian)

"I read the Norwegian writer Jan Kjaerstad's energetic blast of a novel, 'The Seducer', in one. It's irresistible and playful"
(Ali Smith, Books of the Year, TLS)

"Veering from the broadly comic to the beautifully sad, with detours for deadpan meditations on the “Norwegian national character,” this book is not just big [] but big-hearted."
(The New York Times)

The Seducer succeeds at being a great work of fiction, and a terrific read ... Kjærstad is a compelling storyteller, who ties plots and images into an interlocking whole ... The Seducer reads like fast-flowing conversation, elegant and lively"
(The Independent)

First published: 1994. The Seducer is the first book in Kjærstad's trilogy about Jonas Wergeland. The other two books are The Conqueror and The Discoverer .

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