Vaim

The latest novel by Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, Vaim is a book about little boats and big boats, love and death, passive men and an incredibly determined woman. 

Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjørgvin, on his wooden boat, Eline, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button but he is cheated, twice. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to come home to Vaim with him. She leaves a note for her husband Frank, packs her bags and runs away while he is out fishing. Vaim, Jon Fosse’s first novel since he received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of this triangle, a novel about little boats and big boats, love and death, passive men and an incredibly determined woman. And all, of course, was strange… 

‘Reading Jon Fosse is always a curious and wondrous experience. Vaim is no exception: it ferries the reader along the stream of the “ordinary” mind, from which suddenly shines forth a luminous beyond.’
— Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

‘We are in the presence of rare literary greatness. It is for this greatness that the Swedish Academy has justly awarded Jon Fosse the Nobel prize.’
— Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement

‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’
— Le Monde

‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity

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 is his tenth book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.