Praise
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
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
