The heartwarming debut that brought Per Petterson, author of the highly acclaimed "Out Stealing Horses," to prominence. Arvid is six years old and lives on the outskirts of Oslo. His father works in a shoe factory; his Danish mother works as a cleaner. Arvid wets his bed at night and has nightmares about crocodiles, but begins to piece the world together. One day his father is collected in a black car; his grandfather has died, like the bullfinch. When Arvid sees a photo of his mother as a young woman he understands how time passes and then he cries and says he doesn't want to get old. And one morning the teacher tells the pupils to pray to God because a nuclear war is looming. These are beautiful tales of growing up from prizewinning international author Per Petterson

Tommy. How long have we been friends.’ ‘All of our lives,’ Tommy said. ‘I can’t remember us ever not being friends. When would that have been.’ Jim said. ‘I think it could last the rest of our lives,’ he said carefully, in a low voice. ‘Don’t you think.’ ‘It will last if we want it to. It depends on us. We can be friends for as long as we want to.’ Tommy’s mother has gone. She walked out into the snow one night, leaving him and his sisters with their violent father. Without his best friend Jim, Tommy would be in trouble. But Jim has challenges of his own which will disrupt their precious friendship

Early one morning Arvid finds himself standing outside the bookshop where he used to work, drunk, dirty, with two fractured ribs, and no idea how he came to be there. He does not even recognise his face in the mirror. It is as if he has dropped out of the flow of life. Slowly, uncontrollably, the memories return to him, and Arvid struggles under the weight of the tragedy which has blighted his life — the death of his parents and younger siblings in an accident six years previously. At times almost unbearably moving, In the Wake is nonetheless suffused with unexpected blessings: humour, wisdom, human compassion, and a sense of the perpetual beauty of the natural world

The moving story of a young man's life from an international literary master. On his first day of school, a teacher welcomes Audun to the class by asking him to describe his former life in the country. But there are stories about his family he would prefer to keep to himself, 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. So he refuses to talk and refuses to take off his sunglasses. In his late teens Audun is the only one of his family who remains with his mother in their home in a working-class district of Oslo. He delivers newspapers when he is not in school and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with his best friend Arvid. But he's not sure that school is the right path for him, feeling that life holds other possibilities. Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, It's Fine by Me is a brilliant novel from the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses