2019
Impossible metamorphoses, great tits, midges and people with great longings, great sorrow, small problems and big and small thoughts are to be found in the short story collection Evil Flowers. For example, what should you do when you pick evil flowers? What should you say in your opening speech when the brand new museum has sunk into the ground? What do you do when everything you touch turns to mucus? And what can you do when you have longed to see the White Cliffs of Dover, but now you are dead?
Evil Flowers is about love, death and rebellion, about shifting shapes or staying the same, about the tangles involved in what is known as understanding.
Every so often a book appears that is so strikingly different it makes other books all seem the same. The short story collection Evil Flowers is one of those books. [...] Evil Flowers is a unique collection that will enrich the biodiversity of the literary world.
The short stories in Evil Flowers play on the theme of longing for someone to come, longing for connection, with a literary mien is both appealing and confident – precisely because it is never self-righteous.
Reading Øyehaug is a singular experience that I enjoy over and over again. Because I believe that I will find wonder in her texts in new and different places over and over again.
Yet another original book from Gunnhild Øyehaug. […] She allows herself great latitude, compartmentalising short stories which discuss, correct and argue with each other – or otherwise offer a growth, an expansion or change in perspective.
Gunnhild Øyehaug
Helge Skodvin
