Mari Tveita Stagrim

What I'm looking for, isn't here

Two young girls roam around restlessly, along the beach, in the forest, along the street pavements. The clouds move across the sky, the stones scrape against the skin, in the caravan at the centre one can get a free burger for showing one’s tits, Sjur’s father places his hands on the girls’ shoulders and says: Does that feel nice? Pimples throb in the skin, sweat lies in dark rings under arms.

What I’m looking for, isn’t here is a book about friendship and loss, an attempt to understand what actually happened when two teenage girls found each other in a brutal encounter with adult life and lost each other in the time afterwards. In short, episodic glimpses the narrative glides between memories and longing, painful experiences are unravelled, stories are drawn out and placed together into a book about what it means to remember someone.