Praise
Ørstavik unspools a fascinating metafictional story of fear, love, and the desire to make art from life . . . an intriguing literary double act.
The book reached us all. We were all seized by the acute questions the text posed. The existential questions, which no one living here and now can evade.
— Gyldendal Prize jury
Fear and vulnerability alter Ørstavik’s prose and this novel’s style is . . . breathless and urgent. 'Writing is a process of accessing a truth that only the writing can realize,' she has said, and the truths she grapples with while writing this novel are raw and profound. stay with me reflects on fear, violence, and love to devastating effect.
— Pierce Alquist, Book Riot
Norwegian author Ørstavik’s latest reflects on how fear binds current relationships with previous ones, creating an emotional complexity that both unsettles the present and unravels the past . . . In this reflective and poignant novel, Ørstavik precisely depicts tension and unveils the relationships that live and die within the depths of our inner worlds.
— Lillian Liao, Booklist
The readers who are unable to relate to Hanne Ørstavik’s unnamed first-person narrator in stay with me would be the lucky few. In a flowing and immersive narration, the author reveals a warped and desperate logic . . . [Ørstavik's narrator's] valiant efforts to understand herself are spilled vulnerably across the pages.
I was blown away by stay with me. Easily one of my favorite books of the year.
— Caitlin Baker, Island Books in Mercer Island, Washington
In 120 pages of poetic, honest and heart-searing reflection, translated by Martin Aitken, an unnamed woman charts the experience of caring for her dying husband as he refuses to acknowledge his terminal diagnosis. It is a book about intimacy, and the beauty and deep challenge of loving another human being—and how our connections to one another can be both rock solid and as fragile as glass.
— Enuma Okoro on Ti Amo, Financial Times, "Best Books of 2022 List"
Ørstavik sketches a spare but capacious meditation on both the shape of [her characters’] relationship and the effort required, practically and emotionally, by the narrator to care for her partner through the end of his life . . . The narrator maintains a controlled—but not cold—distance that only enriches the intimacy throughout . . . Various phrases and riffs on the word love, including ti amo, sustain an incantatory power, and the brevity of this striking text makes its final moments soar.
— Publishers Weekly on Ti Amo, Starred Review
The novel shares a compassionate vision, bridging the gulf between the one who will go on and the one who will not . . . A remarkably frank and finely sieved account of two people approaching the ultimate parting of the ways.
— Kirkus Reviews on Ti Amo, starred review
A slim, devastating . . . novel driven by a search for an answer to this question: what is the truth of another’s death?
— Kevin Brazil on Ti Amo, Times Literary Supplement
This novella, sometimes hard to read for its bleakness but impossible to look away from, shows that even when we know the destination, the journey is still worthwhile.
— John Self on Ti Amo, The Guardian
In Hanne Ørstavik’s Love, the equilibrium between a tense, disquieting plot and a gently experimental binary structure sustain the reader’s attention and awe from beginning to end. The aerial beauty of Martin Aitken’s translation contributes to make the novel a successful rarity: a book that is at the same time a thriller and a dense literary object. “Perfect” may be the proper adjective to describe it.
— National Book Foundation on Love, 2018 Translated Literature Finalist
Ørstavik's mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality or sensationalism from trailing this story of a woman and her accidentally untended child. Both of them long for love, but the desire lines of the book are beautifully crooked. Jon wants his mother, and to be let in out of the cold . . . the cold that seems a character throughout this excellent novel of near misses.
— Claire Vaye Watkins on Love, New York Times Book Review
