2020. Post festum

2020. Post festum is a stand-alone continuation of Gunnar Staalesen’s sweeping trilogy of novels about Bergen and Norway in the twentieth century. The last twenty years include major dramatic events, such as the attack on the United States on 11 September 2001 and the act of terror that shook Norway on 22 July 2011. The age of oil may be coming to an end, and the battle is over the environment, climate and fundamentalism. The world is connected in completely different ways than it was before.   

Woven into this backdrop is a plot of strong emotions, old hatreds and grudges, emotional wrecks, personal tragedies and dreams of love. Here we follow members of the families Nesbø, Brandt, Moland – familiar to readers from The Bergen Trilogy – and several others through the last twenty years of Norwegian and international history, from the turn of the millennium to the year of the coronavirus, 2020. Beneath it all lies the enigma of the Isdal Woman, a mysterious death that occurred in Bergen in November 1970. Varg Veum comes across new information on the grapevine. Can he solve the case of the Isdal Woman, fifty years after the fact?   

Foreign Sales:
France, Actes Sud

Praise:

“Varg Veum and the Isdal woman form the novel’s outer edges. In between is the original material, an almost total tale about Bergen, about Norway’s place in the world, and about everything that has gone on here from the turn of the millennium to 2020 and the era of the pandemic. It is grand, fascinatingly detailed and written with insight – and not least a distinctive point of view. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the novel takes it all in.”
NRK 

“(…) The novel offers an exceptionally rich cast of characters, and several key figures from the previous volumes also make an appearance here. (…) In our digital lives, where ‘network’ has become an everyday word, there are surprisingly few writers who use network models to compose novels the way Gunnar Staalesen does. This author is obviously ahead of his time.”
Bergens Tidende

“READING FEAST! The follow-up to Gunnar Staalesen’s series of historical novels from Bergen is a treasure trove for readers interested in history. Fortunately, the reading feast is not over for all of us who were absorbed in the three previous volumes of what was known as the Bergen Trilogy but, with Post Festum, has grown into a quadrilogy.” 
VG