Its Fine by Me - Softcover

Per Petterson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846555469 ISBN 13: 9781846555466

Publisher: Random House Export, 2011

Synopsis

Audun is the only one of his family left with his mother in working-class Oslo. He delivers newspapers when he is not in school and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with his best friend. But there are some things Audun won't talk about. Stories about his family, such as the weeks he spent living in a couple of cardboard boxes, and the day of his little brother's birth, when his drunken father fired three shots into the ceiling. Both tender and brutal, It's Fine by Me is a brilliant novel from the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses.

About this title

About the Author

Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled labourer, a bookseller, a writer and a translator until he made his literary debut in 1987 with the short story collection Ashes in my Mouth, Sand in my Shoes, which was widely acclaimed by critics. He made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with the prizewinning novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been published in forty-nine languages so far and won many prizes.

From Booklist

As the new boy in high school, Audun refuses to remove his dark glasses (“I liked the distance they created”), and his wry, melancholy first-person, present-tense narrative nails how the teen’s defiance hides his fragility. Expelled from Boy Scouts, he knows he will never again join an organized group. Haunted by the death of his brother, Ergel, in a car accident, Audun remembers Ergel as “a pain in the ass,” never mind the priest’s “sentimental waffle” at the funeral. Like Petterson’s award-winning Out Stealing Horses (2007), featuring Audun’s friend Arvid, this story is as much about what is not spoken as it is about the angry daily detail (“It’s funny the things you don’t forget”). Much of the focus is on work, as Audun gets up early to run a paper route, then later quits school for a job in a printing press, until he is fired and cannot go home. The casual comments intensify the heartbreak: Why did his father leave? The spaces make the answers (or lack of them) universal. --Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Export
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1846555469
• ISBN 13: 9781846555466
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208