One of the foremost writers of her generation explores the strength and pain of being young
As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.
It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended.
In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores through fiction the parts of childhood that chime through the decades.
About the Author
Vigdis Hjorth is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and best-selling novels. Will and Testament sold 170,000 copies in Norway and has received several awards, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize, as well as being nominated for the National Book Award and Nordic Council Literature Prize. Long Live the Post Horn! won the Believer Book Award for fiction in 2020, and Is Mother Dead was listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
What People Are Saying
"For Freud the ‘compulsion to repeat,’ as he called it, was an unconscious expression of what had been repressed by memory. Here, Hjorth brings that compulsion to life in prose, making the reader feel, at once, the desire to remember and the desire to forget, which battle it out on the field of memory. The novel’s explosive power comes from the tension between those competing desires, and its suspense comes from the presence of the unnamed trauma, which sits outside the family’s house like a hungry beast in the darkness…If Will and Testament shows us the process by which a repressed truth rises to the surface, Repetition shows us how it gets repressed." Madeline Gressel, Parapraxis
"Hjorth writes vividly of the narrator’s teenage confusion and pain, and her lifelong search for comfort. [Repetition] swells with emotion." Publishers Weekly
"This slim new translation from Verso is classic Hjorth: a deceptively simple family story unfolds into dark and painful corners. Told in direct in introspective prose, Hjorth is able to conjure the creaky overconfidence of adolescence and all its uncertainties." James Folta, Most Anticipated Books of 2026, Lit Hub
"Adolescent memories provoke a chronology of embedded emotions in this eloquent, penetrating novel." Foreword Reviews
"Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers." Sheila Heti
"Vigdis Hjorth’s novels are like major fires, destructive and difficult to contain." Literary Review
"The Norwegian author of Long Live the Post Horn! and Will and Testament has formed a formidable cult following." Literary Hub
"Repetition offers [Hjorth's] most sustained attempt to imagine the parents’ morally compromised existence... In the absence of a good officialdom that can help children, Hjorth offers a good witch who can hold them." Elaine Blair, Harper's Magazine