A Life at Stake

The industrial town of Sauda has always been the starting point for Kjartan Fløgstad’s novels. In A Life at Stake, he returns to his own life and upbringing. It is the story of a boy who watches and listens, of life in the streets of the town and work at the factory.

Both playful and serious, the stories that surround him are as colourful, elaborate and baroque as the sweaters his mother knits and the carpentry his father creates. Above the town hangs the manganese cloud, and above the clouds, beyond the horizon, another sky arches higher still.

This is the landscape where the barefoot boy from Dalen Portland ran, announcing that a new era had arrived.

This portrait of a childhood is at once novel and autobiography, poetry and truth, with life itself at stake