Monica Isakstuen

Rage

Norwegian Book Award winning author Monica Isakstuen’s new novel explores the protagonist’s sudden, uncontrollable anger with the ones closest to her.

Rage is a story about two thinking, talking people who meet, fall in love, have twins and buy an old ramshackle house more or less before they know what hit them. Sitting topless and pinned to her sofa by a giant twin nursing pillow (or rather pillory), the protagonist wonders what is left of the person she introduced to her partner two years earlier. How do you love someone so that they really feel it? she asks herself. And am I the sum of my actions or my ideals?

Isakstuen’s original prose moves unexpectedly, but organically, between extremely precise and brilliant insights and moments of the most banal self-deception in this dark, funny, urgent and timely novel.

Rage is edited by Karl Ove Knausgård.