Will and Testament: A Novel

Vigdis Hjorth

sept 2019 · Verso Books

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Longlisted for the National Book Award

Four siblings, two summer houses, one terrible secret—the “prickly, persuasive” bestseller from one of Norway’s most celebrated novelists, perfect for readers of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard (New Yorker)

“ . . . Hypnotic. Hjorth works finely parsed and brilliant variations on her unrelenting theme of familial mistrust and misunderstanding.” —New York Times

When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favoritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different—a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.

Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman’s struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth’s novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.

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Vigdis Hjorth is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and bestselling novels. Will and Testament sold 150,000 copies in Norway and has received several awards, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize, as well as being nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. She lives in Oslo.