The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen, Don Shaw (Translator), Don Bartlett (Translator)

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize • Shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award​ • "Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read."―Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Born on the Norwegian island that bears her name, Ingrid Barrøy’s world is circumscribed by storm-scoured rocks and the moods of the sea by which her family lives and dies. But her father dreams of building a quay that will end their isolation, and her mother longs for the island of her youth, and the country faces its own sea change: the advent of a modern world, and all its unpredictability and violence. Brilliantly translated into English by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, The Unseen is the first book in the Barrøy Chronicles and a moving exploration of family, resilience, and fate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771963190
Publisher:	Biblioasis
Publication date:	04/21/2020
Series:	The Barrøy Chronicles , #1
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Born in Oslo to a family that came from northern Norway, Roy Jacobsen has twice been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literary Award. He is the author of more than fifteen novels and is a member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Dublin Impac Award for his novel The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles. Another novel, Child Wonder, won the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. The Unseen, the first of a series of novels about Ingrid and her family, was a phenomenal bestseller in Norway and was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize and the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award, selected as a 2020 Indie Next pick in North America, and named a New York Times New and Noteworthy book. White Shadow, the second Barrøy novel, was published in North America by Biblioasis in 2021.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Unseen

"Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read."
—Irish Times

"A beautifully crafted novel ... Quite simply a brilliant piece of work ... Rendered beautifully into English by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, The Unseen is a towering achievement that would be a deserved Booker International winner."
—New European

"A profound interrogation of freedom and fate, as well as a fascinating portrait of a vanished time, written in prose as clear and washed clean as the world after a storm.”
—The Guardian

"The subtle translation, with its invented dialect, conveys a timeless, provincial voice ... The Unseen is a blunt, brilliant book."
—Financial Times

"A beautifully written and profoundly moving exploration of conflict, love and human endurance."
—St. Catherines Standard

From the Publisher

★ 2020-01-13
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway's rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid's adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her "la-di-da" ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she'll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family's hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men's and women's roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden's financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature's rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator's decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., "Tha's goen' nohvar" for "You're going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.

A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.

Kirkus Reviews