The Pastor

"In Ørstavik’s deeply thoughtful and captivating latest (after Love), a woman spends a year in Kjøllefjord, Norway, as an assistant pastor . . . The various threads shuffle seamlessly in Liv's head and build to a heartbreaking crescendo, filled in with brilliant descriptions of the flat landscape (a church above the fjord sits “brilliantly white... on a dish of darkness”). Ørstavik distinguishes herself as a leading light in international literature. "—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Praise for Love:


   • In this swift, elegantly constructed novel, Hanne Ørstavik masterfully conveys a sense of entwined dread and longing that doesn't let up for a second. From the opening page to the powerfully moving finale, this tale of a mother and son is riveting. The characters' inner lives are illumined by a beautiful eeriness, and the translation's precision and clarity do justice to the novel's intensities. Read it: it'll bat around your brain for a long time afterward. -- Martha Cooley
   • Ørstavik's mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality or sensationalism from trailing this story of a woman and her accidentally untended child. Both of them long for love, but the desire lines of the book are beautifully crooked. Jon wants his mother, and to be let in out of the cold...the cold that seems a character throughout this excellent novel of near misses. -- Claire Vaye Watkins, New York Times Book Review
   • A haunting masterpiece... The deceptively simple novel is slow-burning, placing each character into situations associated with horror - entering an unfamiliar house, accepting a ride from a stranger - and the result is a magnificent tale. -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
   • Prizewinning Norwegian Ørstavik follows the parallel courses of a single mother and her 8-year-old son during a night that moves unrelentingly toward tragedy... A nightmarish sense of impending doom hangs over these carefully detailed, tightly controlled pages... icy cold to the core. -- Kirkus Reviews
   • Point of view works like a spot of living light in this slender book, with deft perspective shifts occurring between Vibeke, a hardworking, distracted mother, and Jon, her curious, lonely young son, on nearly every page. Mother and son are each on a separate journey, but the reader watches their whole shared life, as memories are folded expertly between breaths in Orstavik's urgent, visually vivid present tense - what a lovely shape. Nothing is wasted. And I'm astonished by the precision and poetry of Martin Aitken's translation from the Norwegian. -- Gina Balibrera, Literati Bookstore
   • A creeping sense of unease is ratcheted up by the cool, lucid prose and how the paragraphs shift between mother and son, clarifying how close they should be and how close they aren't... Multi-award winner Ørstavik offers an unsettling read that most will enjoy. -- Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
   • Love can change everything. And it does in this edgy, elegiac and beautifully written novel...What you think will happen doesn't - and what does breaks your heart. -- Kerri Arsenault, Oprah.com
   • Ørstavik's ingenious device is to toggle between their two consciousnesses from one paragraph to the next, so that their narratives run as though on parallel train tracks, never to meet, even as they lie cheek to cheek. Layers of unremarkable everyday intimacy and acres of emotional distance are compressed between the lines ... Ørstavik has found fertile territory here in which to dig into the raging solipsism of the inner life ... We are all sealed worlds, Ørstavik seems to suggest; it's dark outside, and it's dark inside too. -- Justine Jordan, The Guardian