Vaim Hotel

Discomfiting, propulsive and shot through with dark humour, Vaim Hotel is a striking new novel from Nobel Prize in Literature Jon Fosse.

There is something wrong with the Vaim Hotel, though The Guest cannot say what, nor why he has come to stay. Its only other occupant is Brita, who runs it with brisk authority and swears she has seen him somewhere before, though he is sure she hasn’t. As he acquaints himself with village life, eating each evening at the restaurant Brita also owns, The Guest begins to sense that Vaim is not like other places. Then his belongings begin to slip away: fishing gear, shoulder bag, wallet, keys – each loss drawing him deeper into a debt he has no means to repay. With no way to settle his bill, he must accept that his short trip has become an indefinite stay. Discomfiting, propulsive and shot through with dark humour, Vaim Hotel is a striking new novel from Nobel Prize in Literature Jon Fosse, where everything is as it has always been, and nothing is as it seems.

''A legitimate heir to Kafka, Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, a compulsively readable mystic and one of the greatest living writers. Read him.''
— Javier Cercas, author of Soldiers of Salamis

‘Reading Jon Fosse is always a curious and wondrous experience.’
— Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

‘[H]ow can a novelist make a reader feel so lost and so found at the same time? It is strange. A strange miracle.’
— Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian

‘Whereas Septology was profound and meditative, Vaim is more mysterious and playful. The translation by Damion Searls is, as ever, excellently judged in its rhythms and tones. The narrative has a folk tale quality about it…. A satisfyingly constructed story, Vaim shows Fosse shedding his heavy philosophical burdens (temporarily at least) to enjoy himself as a storyteller.’
— Rónán Hession, Irish Times

‘Something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.’
— Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books and over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’. Vaim Hotel is his eleventh book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.