2024
As usual, Ingrid Winter’s everyday life is full of challenges. At work, she and her colleagues are moving to an open-plan office space with a ‘clean desk’ policy and new, synergy-creating collaboration methods – something quite at odds with Ingrid’s dreams of a professorship and year-long sabbatical. At home, Ingrid is becoming increasingly worried about her daughter Alva, who runs the wrong way on the football pitch, is afraid to touch paper, and is also being bullied by Sara, the most popular girl at school. Christmas is also coming, and unknown to her husband Bjørnar, Ingrid has managed to invite her parents and in-laws, her sister and her sister’s children, her aunt Kari and at least a couple more guests to a fast-approaching Christmas party...
Add to this the uber-successful woman next door with her hugely popular blog at Ingrid’s expense, a couple of concerning lumps in the neck, an Advent calendar that never gets finished, parents who are impossible to please and a dash of generalised death anxiety, and you have Ingrid Winter’s life in a nutshell.
Winter War is Janne S. Drangsholt’s third stand-alone novel about Ingrid Winter.
Drangsholt has a clear talent for comedy, and is outstanding at finding the right ways to convey comic situations and achieve balance between them. She fluctuates unrestrainedly between high and low, light-heartedness and gravitas, humour and sincerity.
A fine farce from the country’s new star of comedy... Many comic books are currently being written in Norway, but Janne S. Drangsholt has created a niche that’s well worth a visit.
Janne Stigen Drangsholt
