Books

Sheldon Horowitz – widowed, old, impatient, impertinent – has grudgingly agreed to join his granddaughter and her husband Lars in a strange and exotic land: Norway. A country of blue and ice with one thousand Jews, and not one of them a former Marine sniper from the Korean war turned watch repairman who failed his only son by sending him to Vietnam to die. Not until now, anyway.

In the neighbourhood of Tøyen, an extraordinary event leads Sheldon and a seven-year-old Balkan child on a desperate escape through the Norwegian wilderness in a bold effort to outfox a murderer. As their pursuers close in, so does Sheldon’s past.

Norwegian by Night is the last adventure of a man coming to terms with the tragedy of his own life as he tries to save another’s. It combines deadpan humour, moral seriousness, visceral grief, and narrative tension in a remarkable way – and Sheldon seems set to become one of fiction’s famous heroes.