Seven Days in September
By Jørgen Gunnerud
Description
Shortlisted for the P2 Listeners' Novel Prize
Seven Days in September takes place during World War II. Three separate story lines cross each other at the end of a deep fjord in western Finnmark. A German aircrew takes off from France to join the attack on the Russian convoy PQ 18 in Finnmark. We become acquainted with the members of the crew, their personalities, desires and hopes for the future. The second story is about the local fisherman Gustav Henriksen, a war hero from the battle of Narvik, about his family, his work and the society he lives in. The third person to stumble into the novel is Kristian Kolseth, a young ethnography student from Oslo’s wealthier quarters, who has travelled north in order to document building customs among the coast Sami in Finnmark.
The novel is packed with suspense, and the outcome is uncertain all the way to the final page. Characters and environments are drawn with great realism. This is a powerful story about how the war affected people’s daily lives, their work and their social relations, set in a corner of WW II that has received little attention in Norwegian histories of the war.
