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Lars Ramslie
The Mountain, the Gun, the Lake

It’s the summer of 1983. For once, nine-year-old Lars spends the holidays with his father, who left the family years earlier and who has led a messy, self-destructive existence ever since. They have travelled to the farm on the west coast, where his father grew up – the farm that his father lost when he was disinherited. One day Lars’ father tells him that they’re going up in the mountains, without saying why or where. They walk without water and have very little food, but each of them carries a gun. Several times the father disappears, before appearing again. Frightened, tired and confused, the boy is unable to understand what’s going on. Is it a test? Or is his father trying to teach him something?

With great tenderness, Ramslie portrays a father who is lost in his role as a father, and a boy trying to find out who he will be. It’s a dark, mesmerizing story of love and attachment in the most precarious of circumstances.

Lars Ramslie

Hugo Ryvik

Lars Ramslie (born 1974) is one of the most distinctive and unique voices in Norwegian contemporary literature. He made his debut in 1997 with the novel Biopsy, for which he was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas First Book Prize. In 2004 Ramslie was voted one of Norway’s 10 best writers under 35 by the Norwegian Festival of Literature and Morgenbladet. His books have been translated into English, Russian and Finnish. The Mountain, the Gun, the Lake is his seventh novel.