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If Only
A Literary Fiction Novel by Vigdis Hjorth
Subgenres:
- Domestic Fiction,
- Psychological Fiction,
- Marriage-in-Crisis
This book is for you if you're into...
- Icy Scandinavian settings that mirror inner turmoil
- Intense introspection on love, longing, and self-destruction
NYPL's Best Books of 2024
A groundbreaking, potent novel about the destructive force of romantic love from award-winning writer Vigdis Hjorth.
A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.
So opens Vigdis Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.
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