Best Selling Books by Jon Fosse

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 "Melancholy" takes us deep inside a painter''s fragile consciousness, vulnerable to everything but therefore uniquely able to see its beauty and its light.

The celebrated Norwegian novelist’s magnum opus, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, published in one volume for the first time. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers – two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness. Jon Fosse’s Septology is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic and utterly unique. ‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’ – Karl Ove Knausgaard ‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’ – Le Monde ‘An extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself…the culminating project of an already major career.’ – Randy Boyagoda, New York Times ‘A major work of Scandinavian fiction …Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths.’ – Hari Kunzru ‘I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.’ – Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books

Trilogy is Jon Fosse’s critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption. Consisting of three novellas (Wakefulness, Olav’s Dreams, and Weariness), Trilogy is a haunting, mysterious, and poignant evocation of love, for which Fosse received The Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature in 2015.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes''s father''s thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes''s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.

Includes A Summer''s Day, Dream of Autumn and Winter These three seasonal plays are typical Fosse, imbuing apparently mundane situations with an almost hypnotic intensity. In A Summer''s Day, an old widow remembers the day, many years before, when her husband went out to sea in a terrible storm. In a series of continuous but chronologically distinct scenes, Dream of Autumn shows a man unexpectedly meeting an old friend: she will become his second wife, and cause him to fall out with his family. In Winter a fascinating but mercurial woman tries to seduce a businessman, but once he has given up his family and career, he realises may have mistaken her intentions.

Includes the plays And We''ll Never be Parted, The Son, Visits and Meanwhile the lights go down and everything becomes black In And We''ll Never be Parted, Jon Fosse exploits theatre''s unique potential for ambiguity: as a woman anxiously waits for her husband, are we watching reality, fantasy, memory, or even a ghost story? The Son concerns an ageing and isolated couple, whose long-absent son has a score to settle with their meddlesome neighbour.In the oblique but psychologically penetrating Visits, a withdrawn teenager, apparently upset by the attentions of her mother''s boyfriend, turns to her brother for help. The short play Meanwhile the lights go down and everything becomes black, exploring the dilemmas of an errant husband, his young lover and his family, displays Fosse''s characteristic compression of theatrical time and space at its most concentrated.

They have a child and life changes. He can''t go out and she can''t stay in. He writes words that no one will publish and she takes a lover. "I don''t know what it is/ that always make something happen/ But it must be something/ because something always happens/ I don''t want anything to happen/ and then something/ happens all the same."

An elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, from the author of Scenes from a Childhood.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 One of Jon Fosse’s most acclaimed novels, Boathouse features an unnamed narrator who leads a hermit-like existence until he unexpectedly encounters a long-lost childhood friend and his wife. Part stream-of-consciousness metafictive exercise, part gripping crime novel, Boathouse slowly unravels the story of a love triangle to reveal a tale of jealousy and betrayal.

A young man lives alone with his mother and his beloved dog in a house in a small village overlooking the fjord. The dog has run off and gone missing. This has never happened before... In The Dead Dogs, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the direction of their future. Fosse''s drama explores life lived in unexpected ways, with a sense of otherness pervading the present and colouring the characters'' relationships.

A new volume of plays from one of the leading Norwegian writers.

The wind gathers, rising up suddenly. Two men on a fragile boat, a trip to sea – a few drinks, a bite to eat – when one of them decides to push on to the open ocean. Suddenly there they are: among the distant islands, the threatening fog and gathering swell of the sea, bound together on an odyssey into the unknown. Jon Fosse’s work includes novels, poetry, essays and books for children. He is one of the most produced playwrights in Europe and his plays have been translated into forty languages. Oberon Books publishes Nightsongs and The Girl on the Sofa, and his other plays in the following collections: Plays One, Plays Two, Plays Three, Plays Four and Plays Five. Plays Six is forthcoming in 2012. Oberon Books also publishes The Luminous Darkness: The Theatre of Jon Fosse by Leif Zern (translated by Ann Henning-Jocelyn).

The essential lecture delivered by the 2023 Nobel Laureate in Literature, published for the first time in a collectible edition. "If there''s any metaphor I would use for the act of writing, it would have to be listening," says Jon Fosse in A Silent Language, the lecture he delivered after being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he writes, Fosse explains, he listens for texts that exist somewhere outside of himself in order to transcribe them before they disappear. With reverence and humility, Fosse traces his relationship to writing and celebrates the capacity of language to embrace the mystery, complexity, and existential uncertainty of the human experience. "It is only in the silence that you can hear God''s voice," he says, offering a key to his beloved works of drama and fiction. "Maybe."

Jon Fosse has been called ''the Beckett of the 21st century'' (Le Monde), and the Royal Court production of Nightsongs was dubbed ''Waiting for Godot without the gags''. Just as Beckett''s plays - and those of all great playwrights - grew out of their time, and influenced the current styles of drama, and were part of what brought their times forward, so do Fosse''s plays now. Fosse: Plays Six marks the culmination of this Norwegian playwright''s body of work for the stage to be published in the English language. The volume includes the plays Rambuku, Freedom, Over There, These Eyes, Girl in Yellow Raincoat, Christmas Tree Song and Sea. Rambuku: Two people. One finds it difficult to speak. The other attempts to understand. But what is Rambuku? Or who is Rambuku? Freedom: There is a sense of otherness in Fosse''s work that challenges our notions of a concept such as ''freedom''. This play questions if freedom, as we often understand it, is perhaps a prison. Over There: A woman follows a man to his death. But do they see the same images on the way to the top of the mountain? These Eyes: A snapshot of the dreamlike state of life. The characters exist in an in-between space which becomes their reality. Girl in Yellow Raincoat: An examination of our collective weakness, and the fragility of children. It asks questions about notions surrounding fear. Christmas Tree Song: A man celebrates Christmas alone (and reflects in a somewhat ironic way) on his life as he attempts to put up a Christmas tree. Sea: A group of people gathered in a kind of limbo, on a ship, disappearing into something unknown.

From the 2023 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a haunting masterpiece exploring love, loss, and human fate. In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of family and the battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle''s great-great-grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse''s vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on.

The lives of an aging painter and his doppelganger converge and diverge in an elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, in the second book of the celebrated Norwegian writer''s three-volumeSeptology.

Includes the plays Someone is Going to Come, The Guitar Man, The Name and The Child In Someone is Going to Come the two of them want to be together, just the two of them, so they leave the city and buy a remote house by the sea. But is it possible to do what they want to do? Won''t somebody come? Surely someone will come. The Guitar Man is a poignant monologue in which a busker sings songs to an audience that is always on the move, always passing him by. The Name (winner of the Ibsen Prize in Norway) tells the story of an estranged family forced to live under one roof. When a pregnant girl and the father of the child have nowhere to live, they move into her parents'' house. But the parents have never met the father-to-be, and don''t yet know about the pregnancy. In The Child a man and a woman find each other in a bus stop on a rainy night. They hold each other close. They rent an old house out of town. The woman becomes pregnant. But the child is too small to survive. In these four varied plays Jon Fosse''s unique linguistic style, at once poetic and naturalistic, magnifies the love and pain of ordinary people seeking to live their lives. Cast sizes: 3,6,1,6

Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this wild, feverish narrative, Jon Fosse delves into Hertervig''s mind as the events of one day precipitate his mental breakdown. A student of Hans Gude at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Hertervig is paralyzed by anxieties about his talent and is overcome with love for Helene Winckelmann, his landlady''s daughter. Marked by inspiring lyrical flights of passion and enraged sexual delusions, Hertervig''s fixation on Helene persuades her family that he must leave. Oppressed by hallucinations and with nowhere to go, Hertervig shuttles between a cafe, where he endures the mockery of his more sophisticated classmates, and the Winckelmann''s apartment, which he desperately tries to re-enter - a limbo state which leads him inexorably into a state of madness. Published here in one volume in English for the first time, Melancholy I-II is a major novel by ''the Beckett of the twenty-first century'' (Le Monde).

Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by Jon Fosse, ''the Beckett of the twenty-first century'' (Le Monde).

A girl sits on a sofa, not knowing what to do with herself. She argues with her mother and envies her older sister. She also longs for her absent father, a seaman. A middle-aged woman paints a portrait of herself as a young girl, sitting on a sofa, but she''s beginning to doubt her artistic ability. Still at odds with her sister and her mother and haunted by her dead father, she''s unable to shake the continuing presence of the past in her life... Jon Fosse''s new play, and this English version by David Harrower, were commissioned by the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

"A postmodern poet who successfully employed classic structures to exploit the range of possibilities inherent in the Slovenian language, this selection from the life''s work of Milan Jesih highlights his revolutionary approach to verse. Beginning with humor and autobiography and gradually withdrawing into a universe of fragments, quotations, dreams, and doubt, this collection offers English readers a first glimpse into the work of one of Slovenia''s literary treasures" --

Not so much a sequel as an alternate perspective, Jon Fosse’s coda to his brilliant and much-lauded Melancholy, picks up the story of tormented landscape painter Lars Hertervig in 1902, shortly after his death. In the same meticulous and hypnotic prose for which Fosse is famous, Melancholy II serves not only as an investigation into the “collateral damage” of art, but into a master’s tools and obsessions. Taking place, like Melancholy, over the course of a single day, we are treated to the thoughts of Hertervig’s sister Oline, carrying on with her life in the absence of her beloved—if eccentric—brother. She recalls their childhood under a domineering father, recalls Hertervig’s difficulties fitting in, and likewise Hertervig the man: poor, always hovering on the brink, fanatical about painting and his own perceived shortcomings both as an artist and human being. In the same meticulous and hypnotic prose for which Fosse is famous, Melancholy II serves not only as an investigation into the “collateral damage” of art, but into a master’s tools and obsessions.

Written in melodious and hypnotic ''slow prose'', A New Name, the final volume in Jon Fosse''s Septology, is a transcendent exploration of the human condition by Jon Fosse, and a radically other reading experience - incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

Social-modernistisk roman fra Vestlandet om en ung norsk kvinde.