The Cocktail Effect

Summer guests come and stay at Ingrid and Balder’s house down by the fjord – their children with their husbands and new lovers, grandchildren, an old father, a half-sister no one knew anything about, three hens and two old, unpredictable neighbouring sisters. And the writer Ingrid is haunted by the famous colleague who situated her masterpiece in her writing cabin, and who once lived and died an old-fashioned, dramatic writer’s life there.

Ingrid writes with all these people around her about the summer twenty-five years earlier when she fell in love, took her three daughters and left her husband in order to choose a different life.

The novel is a burlesque tapestry of stories about four generations, about the conflict between art and life, career and love in past and present, about being a human being, a mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, sweetheart and writer in a new age.