In the Wake - Hardcover

Like Paul Auster's "Book of Illusions", Per Petterson's masterful American debut novel tells the story of a writer whose life stands still after a terrible accident takes the lives of his family. The grief and guilt he feels over having survived is too over-whelming, and work on his novel stalls as he moves through life in a cold haze. Arvid's only human contact is with his Kurdish neighbour and with a woman whom he glimpses in a flat across the road. Then, slowly, the memories begin to return. And he begins to write again. Poignant, restrained, and at times unbearably moving, "In the Wake" is informed by terrible tragedy and by one man's sense of beauty in the natural world, at times his only source of solace.