Home to Me

a flow and a tempo which makes the story ceaselessly exciting

A complex novel about love and infidelity ... it's very well done

The strange thing is that you still don't get tired of this novel, whose skilled prose keeps a high tempo even in the less eventful parts, with commas keeping the pulsating beat.

Hits the reader like unusually noisy static on the inner lines; in my many years as a critic I have rarely experienced a similiar reaction ... One of the novel's numerous qualities is that there is no soggy moral at the end telling us either that the proper thing is to throw yourself into the maelstrom of physical delight or to walk the plank into the increasing predictability of a protracted marriage. Trude Marstein's purpose is to dissect the anatomy of the pain Ove's indecision brings on himself ... This is done in such an insightful, precise and infectious way that you want to both beat up and hug this lonesome doctor.

[I rate] Trude Marstein among the two or three greatest Norwegian writers ... Danish readers haven't really discovered how much human insight woven into prose free from cliches, and put into large compositions that this writer actually possesses.

a captivating novel about a man who just has to have a mistress ... You would think it would become boring. But it doesn't, because the women Ove meets and deceives are so different from each other ... she has described Ove so convincingly that you understand that for him it couldn't be any other way

wise and insisting  ... The nice thing about  Trude Marstein's merciless portrait of the psychology of a womanizer is the encirclement of the repeated psychological mechanism dictating that everyday life must be supplemented by the experience of intensity in new sexual relations ... an important book with great human insight which persistently points out the value of empathy and long-term emotional commitment.

The author never looks down at Ove's life, and she doesn't judge him either ... That judgement is left to the reader ... And it is precisely in this that Marstein's books are unusal and unusually intense ... Judge for yourself. That is what Trude Marstein demands of her reader. That is what is so fascinating. Also because her exploration of the anatomy of infidelity is so universal.

It’s been years since I read a novel better than Trude Marstein’s latest, Home to Me, plumbing more profoundly, more accurately and more exuberantly (…) My recommendation is unambiguous: Read it!

A ruthless, impressive novel about a man who seeks affirmation and dreams of genuine contact, but constantly ends up in a dead end.

Home to Me is both typical of the author and surprisingly different. Effortless and entertaining, it is uncomfortably sharp at the edges. Trude Marstein at her very best, in other words.

Home to Me makes an excellent job of relating, through an examination of clichés, why we always long to be in a different place from where we are, yearning for something different from what we have, and why this is both totally absurd and just as completely unavoidable.

Trude Marstein depicts everyday life and various psychological profiles so aptly that you would think she had filmed living people and read their thoughts.