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Carl Frode Tiller
A Worker’s Heart - Book 1

Trond got what he wanted.

He grew up in a rural working-class environment in the 1970s and 1980s, his father a sawmill worker and card-carrying communist, his mother a nursing assistant who broke with her puritan Christian family. But Trond had higher ambitions. He studied at university, married the bourgeois Therese and eased into a middle-class life. He got just what he wanted – but now he has lost it. He has lost his job, divorced his wife, and he doesn’t understand his daughters. He is at constant war with both his surroundings and himself.

Elegantly shifting between Trond’s present and past, A Worker’s Heart is a novel about the great social and political changes of the past decades. But it’s also a story about the impact that these greater changes have on our most intimate relationships, about rage and desperation, about love and longing.

This is the first book of a two-volume work. The second book is scheduled for publication autumn 2025.

'Razor-sharp from Carl Frode Tiller. […] Self-assertion, embarrassment, and longing for recognition: Hardly anyone depicts the complicated family life better than him.'

VG, 5/6 stars

'A sparkling mix of discontent and humor. […] Conflicts and alienation are unearthed, it is both destructive and constructive, and it is in these frictions that Tiller creates his literary works of art. […] Tiller has written a raw and entertaining novel that contains deep insights about the loss of meaning in life, and with a longing for unity that has disappeared. Uplifting nonetheless, because it is spiced with a finely ground portion of humor.'

Adresseavisen, 5/6 stars

Carl Frode Tiller

Carl Frode Tiller
Trine Melhuus

Doubtless one of his generation’s most important novelists, Carl Frode Tiller (b 1970) is admired for his instantly recognizable, furious prose and his ability to create vivid, complex characters. Tiller succeeds in portraying these tragic characters in a way that arouses the deepest sympathy in the reader.

In 2005 he was named one of the 10 best Norwegian writers under 35. In 2006, The Slope was named among the 25 most important Norwegian novels from the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in the daily Dagbladet. In 2018, LA Review of Books characterized his latest US publication Encircling 2 as an “incomparable intellectual escarpade”.

In addition to his novels, Tiller has written several plays, short stories and short prose for various magazines and newspapers.

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Oslo Literary Agency
Henrik Francke
[email protected]
+47 913 53 922
osloliteraryagency.no

Awards

European Prize for Literature 2009
Hunger Prize 2008
Brage Prize 2007
Critics’ Prize 2007
Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award 2001
Listeners’ Novel Prize 2001

Edited September 24, 2024 by Oslo Literary Agency